by André Aciman
“Avvocato,” he called out, “look who’s here!”
Forestalling her husband’s response, Signora Lavezzoli was ready to step in. She raised her eyes at once from her tablecloth and hurriedly stretched out the back of her hand to Fadigati.
“Of course . . . of course . . .” she trilled.
Fadigati stepped forward dejectedly into the sunlight, and as usual staggered a little because of his shoes and the sand. Still, having reached the Lavezzoli’s tent, he kissed the signora’s hand, shook hands with the lawyer who in the meantime had stood up, then one by one shook the hands of the three children. Finally he returned to our tent, where my father had already prepared a reclining deckchair for him alongside our mother’s. He seemed much more serene than he had a moment before: relieved as a student after a particularly taxing exam.
As soon as he had sat down, he breathed out a sigh of satisfaction.
“But how glorious it is here,” he said, “what a wonderful draft of cool air!”
He turned three quarters round to speak to me.
“Do you remember that scorching weather we had last month in Bologna?”
He then explained to my mother and father, whom I had never told of our regular meetings on the six-fifty express train, or of how in the last three months we had become “such good friends.” He spoke with worldly negligence. It hardly seemed possible to him, one could see why, to find himself here with us, next to the feared Lavezzolis even, suddenly restored to his set, brought back into the polite and cultured fold to which he had always belonged. “Ah” he kept sighing, broadening his chest to gather in the morning breeze. It was evident he felt happy, free, and brimming with gratitude toward all of us for allowing him to feel this way.
Soon my father had steered the conversation back to the incredible heat of August in Ferrara.
“At night you couldn’t sleep,” he said, twisting his face into a grimace of suffering: as though even the memory of that urban heat were enough for him to feel once more its sheer oppressiveness. “Believe me, Doctor, you just couldn’t sleep. There are those who consider the modern period to have begun with the invention of bug spray. I won’t argue with them. But bug spray means having the windows closed. And closed windows means the sheets stick to you with sweat. I’m not joking. Until yesterday I was waiting in a state of terror as night drew near. Damned mosquitoes!”
“It’s different here,” said Fadigati in a fit of enthusiasm. “Even on the hottest nights you can always breathe.”
And he began to hold forth on the “advantages” of the Adriatic coast compared to the other coasts of Italy. He was a Venetian—he admitted as much—and had spent his childhood and adolescence at the Lido, and so perhaps his judgement could be accused of bias. But the Adriatic still seemed to him a great deal more restful than the west, the Tyrrhenian coast.
Signora Lavezzoli had pricked up her ears. Concealing her malicious intent behind a bogus municipal pride, she vehemently took up the defence of the Tyrrhenian. She declared that if she were offered the choice between a holiday stay at Riccione and one at Viarreggio, she wouldn’t hesitate for a second.
“Mark my words,” she added, “some evenings passing the Cafe Zanarini one feels one’s never moved a mile from Ferrara. At least in the summer, let’s be honest, one has the desire, just for a change, to see different faces than those on offer the rest of the year. Here it’s like walking down the Corso Giovecca, or the Corso Roma, beneath the arches of the Caffè della Borsa. Don’t you think?”
Uneasy, Fadigati shifted on his deckchair. Once again his eyes took flight toward the beach huts. But still no sign of Deliliers.
“You may be right. You may be right,” he replied with a nervous smile, turning to gaze at the sea.
As it did every morning between eleven and noon, the water had changed color. It was no longer the pallid, oily mass of a half-hour earlier. The brisk wind that came from the open sea, the sun almost at its height, had transformed it into a blue expanse, scattered with innumerable glints of gold. The rush of the first bathers had begun to cross the beach. And even the three Lavezzoli children, after having asked permission of their mother, made their way toward their beach hut to change into their swimming costumes.
“You may be right,” Fadigati repeated. “But where can one find, my dear Signora, afternoons of the kind that the sun allows us here, when it starts to drop behind ‘the deep blue vision of San Marino’?”‡‡
He had declaimed the line by Pascoli in a lightly nasal, singsong voice, detaching every syllable and making sure not to elide the diaresis of “visïon.” An embarrassed silence followed; but the doctor had already embarked on a further discourse.
“I’m well aware,” he went on, “that the sunsets of the west coast are magnificent. But still, one has to pay a high price to see them: the price, I mean, of scorching afternoons, with the sea transformed into a kind of burning glass, and with everyone forced to be corked up inside their houses, or else having to take refuge in the pinewoods. By contrast, you must have noticed the Adriatic’s color after two or three o’clock. More than blue, it becomes black: in short, it stops one being dazzled. The water’s surface absorbs the sun’s rays rather than reflecting them. Or rather, it does reflect them, yes, but in the direction of . . . Yugoslavia! As far as I’m concerned,” he concluded, absent-mindedly, “I can’t wait to finish eating so as to get straight back to the beach. Two o’clock in the afternoon. There’s no more beautiful time to enjoy in holy peace our divine, beloved Adriatic!”
“I suppose you’ll be enjoying it with that . . . with that inseparable companion of yours,” Signora Lavezzoli said in an acid tone.
Brought rudely down to earth, confused, Fadigati kept silent.
Just then, a sudden gathering of people a hundred meters or so away toward the town drew my father’s attention.
“What on earth’s going on?” he asked, raising a hand above his eyes to see better.
Over the gusts of wind arrived the mixed sounds of congratulatory cries and clapping.
“It’s Il Duce taking a dip,” Signora Lavezzoli explained demurely.
My father twisted his mouth.
“It would seem not even the sea can save us,” he complained between his teeth.
Romantic, patriotic, politically naive and inexperienced like so many Jews of his generation, my father, returning from the Front in 1919, had also enrolled in the Fascist Party. He had thus been a Fascist from the “very beginning,” and at heart had remained one despite his gentleness and his honesty. But since Mussolini, after the early scuffles, had begun to reach an agreement with Hitler, my father had started to feel uneasy. He never stopped thinking about the possibility of an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Italy as well, and suffering from it, he would allow the odd bitter word against the Regime to escape him.
“He’s so straightforward, so very human,” Signora Lavezzoli went on without paying any attention to my father. “Like a good husband, every Saturday morning he starts out in his car and off he goes—able to drive from Rome to Riccione in one go.”
“Truly a good husband,” my father sneered. “Who knows how happy ‘the lady’ Rachele is!”§
He was looking meaningly at the lawyer Lavezzoli, seeking his support. Wasn’t the lawyer Lavezzoli one who had refused to carry the Party card? Hadn’t he signed the famous Benedetto Croce manifesto in 1924, and at least for some years, at least until 1930, hadn’t he been dubbed a “liberal democrat” and a defeatist? But it was all in vain. Although the lawyer’s eyes finally unglued themselves from the thick pages of Antonio Adverse, they remained insensible to the mute appeal in my father’s. Stretching his neck, lowering his eyelids, the illustrious lawyer and professor stubbornly gazed seaward. The “children” had hired a pleasure boat, and were driving it too far from the shore.
“Last Saturday,” Signora Lavezzoli meanwhile recalled, “Filippo and I were returning home arm in arm along the Viale dei Mille. It was half past seven, or a
little earlier, when suddenly, from the gate of a villa, who should I see emerging? Il Duce in person, dressed in white from top to toe. I said: ‘Good evening, Your Excellency.’ And he replied, polite as can be, raising his hat: ‘Good evening, Signora.’ Isn’t it true, Pippo,” she added, turning toward her husband, “isn’t it true he was so wonderfully polite?”
The lawyer nodded.
“Perhaps we should have the grace to recognize our errors,” he said gravely, turning back toward my father. “The Man, let’s not forget it, has given us the Empire.”
As though they had been etched on a magnetic tape, I find in my memory, one after the other, every word that was said on that distant afternoon.
Having pronounced his judgement—on hearing it my father’s eyes widened—the lawyer Lavezzoli turned back to his reading. But the signora by now could not contain herself. Spurred on by her spouse’s remark, and in particular by that word, “Empire,” which she had perhaps never before then heard on his austere lips, she plunged into an endless panegyric on Il Duce’s “great heart,” his generous Romagnolo blood.
“Speaking of which,” she said, “I’d like to tell you about an event which I myself witnessed three years ago, right here in Riccione. One morning Il Duce was taking a swim with his two elder boys Vittorio and Bruno. About one o’clock, he came back out of the water, and what did he find waiting for him? A telegraphic dispatch had arrived a moment before, apprising him of the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss. That year our tent was just a few steps away from Mussolini’s: so what I’m telling you is the gospel truth. No sooner had he read the telegram than Il Duce let out a loud swear word in dialect—there’s no getting away from it, temperament will out! But then he began to weep. I saw with my own eyes the tears that scored his cheeks. They were great friends, the Mussolinis and the Dollfusses. More than that: Signora Dollfuss, a tiny woman, slim, shy, very pretty, was a guest in their villa that very summer, along with her very young children. And he wept, Il Duce, undoubtedly thinking of what, a few minutes later, when he returned home for lunch, he would have to say to that poor, wretched mother . . .”
Fadigati suddenly stood up. Humiliated by Signora Lavezzoli’s poisonous remark, from that moment on he had not opened his mouth. He had kept on anxiously biting his lip. How come Deliliers was so delayed? What could have happened to him?
“If I may . . .” he stammered in an embarrassed manner.
“But it’s early yet!” Signora Lavezzoli protested. “Aren’t you going to wait for your friend? There are still twenty minutes to go before the church bell sounds!”
Fadigati murmured something incomprehensible. Going in a circle, he shook hands with everyone, then trudged off toward his beach umbrella.
Having reached it, he leaned down and gathered up the detective novel and the bathing towel. After which, we saw him once again cross the beach under the one o’clock sun, but this time going back toward the hotel.
He walked uneasily, holding the book under his arm and the towel on his shoulders, his face discomposed by sweat and anxiety. So much so that my father, who had been quickly brought up to date with everything, and who was watching him with a compassionate eye, murmured beneath his breath:
“Puvràz.”¶
10.
SOON AFTER lunch I returned alone to the beach.
I sat down under the tent. The sea had turned a dark blue. That day, though, starting a few yards from the shore and as far away as the eye could see, the tip of every wave hoisted a plume whiter than snow. The wind still blew from the sea, but now slightly across. If I lifted my father’s military binoculars so as to frame the spur at the Punta di Pesaro which ended the arc of the bay to my right, I could see the pine trunks up there swaying, their tops being wildly ruffled. Driven by the so-called Greek wind of the afternoon, the long breakers advanced in closed and successive ranks. Before they began to lower their high crests of foam, which all but vanished in the last few yards, it seemed as though they were rushing in to attack the land. Stretched out on the reclining deckchair, I listened to their muffled crash against the shore.
The desert of the sea, from which even the sails of the little fishing-boats had disappeared—most of them could be seen, the next morning, a Sunday, in rows on the wharves of the canal docks in Rimini and Cesentico—was mirrored by the almost equally deserted beach. Under a tent not far from our own someone was playing a gramophone. I couldn’t tell what music it was: perhaps jazz. For more than three hours I remained like that, with my eyes fixed on an old clam fisher who was raking the seabed there in front of me, very close to dry land, and no less dejected and tireless with that music in his ears. When I got up, a little after five o’clock, the old man was still searching for clams, and the gramophone still playing its music. The sun had greatly lengthened the shadows of the tents and the beach umbrellas. That of Fadigati’s umbrella had now almost reached the sea.
On the seafront, the rotunda of the Grand Hôtel bordered directly on the dunes. As soon as I set foot on them I saw Fadigati seated on one of the concrete benches in front of the hotel’s outside stairway.
He spotted me at the same time.
“Good afternoon,” I said, walking toward him.
He gestured at the bench.
“Why not sit down? Sit down for a moment.”
I obeyed.
He moved his hand to the inside pocket of his jacket, drew out a packet of Nazionali, and held it out to me.
In the packet there were only two cigarettes left. He realized that I was reluctant to accept.
“They’re only Nazionali!” he exclaimed, with a strange gleam of enthusiasm in his eyes.
He had also understood the reason for my hesitation, and smiled.
“Oh, go on, take one! As good friends do—one for you and one for me.”
Whistling on the curve’s asphalt, a car burst on to the big square. Fadigati turned to look at it, but without hope. It was not, as it happened, the Alfa, but a Fiat 1500, a grey saloon.
“I think I ought to go,” I said.
However, I took one of the two cigarettes.
I examined my clogs.
“I see that you’ve come from the beach. How wonderful the sea is today!”
“Yes, but not for swimming in.”
“Don’t dream of diving in until an hour after eating—take my advice!” he exclaimed. “You’re a boy, without doubt you’ll have the strongest of hearts, lucky chap, but coronary disease can strike you down like that, can cut down even the most robust.”
He proffered the lighted match.
“You have something planned for now?”
I told him that I was expected at six o’clock by the young Lavezzolis. We had arranged to play then at the tennis court behind the Cafe Zanarini. Although it was still some twenty minutes before six, I had to go by my house, change and pick up the racket and tennis balls. I was worried that I wouldn’t arrive on time.
“Let’s hope that Fanny doesn’t decide to come along too!” I added. “My mother won’t let her go without redoing her braids, which means I’ll be a good ten minutes late.”
As I spoke, I saw him involved in a curious maneuver. He took the Nazionale from his lips, turned it round and lit it at the other end, where the trademark was. Then he threw away the empty packet.
Only at this point did I realize the ground in front of us was scattered with butts, more than a dozen of them.
“Have you seen how much I’m smoking?” he said.
“Indeed.”
I was longing to ask him a question. “And Deliliers?” But I wasn’t up to it.
I got to my feet and made to shake hands.
“If I’m not wrong, you didn’t use to smoke at all.”
“I’m trying to make my own modest contribution to the spread of . . . maladies of the throat,” he laughed miserably. “I thought it might help me.”
I walked a few paces away.
“You said the tennis court near the Zanari
ni, didn’t you?” he called out from behind. “I might just come along later to watch you all.”
As became clear shortly after, nothing serious had happened to Deliliers. Instead of going for a swim at Riccione, he had suddenly felt the desire to do so at Rimini, where he knew some sisters from Parma who were staying in the sumptuous Hôtel Vittoria. He had taken the car and disappeared without even bothering to leave a couple of lines to inform his roommate. Then he had come back at around eight o’clock—recounted Signora Lavezzoli who, together with her husband, found herself by chance in the lobby of the Grand Hôtel drinking an aperitif. Unexpectedly they had seen “that Deliliers” crossing the hall with long strides, looking furious, and with Fadigati almost in tears at his heels.
It was Deliliers who approached me that very evening on the terrace of the Grand Hôtel.
I had gone there with my parents and with the ubiquitous Lavezzolis, lawyer and wife. Still tired after tennis, I did not feel like dancing. I listened in silence to Signora Lavezzoli who, although she was certainly not unaware of how much it could offend us, had begun to hold forth, proclaiming her “objectivity” on the subject of Hitler’s Germany, arguing that one finally had to accept and recognize its “undeniable greatness.”
“But, Signora, you should take note that your Dollfuss, it seems, was disposed of by Hitler himself,” I said with a sneer.
“That’s of no importance!” she snorted.
She took on the complacent and long-suffering expression of a schoolmistress inclined to overlook any foible committed by her favorite in the class.
“Such things unfortunately are political necessities,” she proceeded. “Let’s leave aside any personal prejudices for or against. The fact is that in certain circumstances a Head of State, a true Statesman worthy of the name, must also be capable of moving beyond the delicate feelings of the common people, of the small people like ourselves.”
She broke into a smile full of pride, in stark contrast with these last words.