by André Aciman
“Footholds?” she interrupted, bursting out laughing. “Me, I’d call them ‘notches.’”
“That’s too bad, because they’re called ‘footholds,’” I insisted stubbornly and tartly. “You can tell you’ve never been mountaineering.”
Since childhood I have always suffered from vertigo and though it was a modest climb it had me worried. As a child, when my mother with Ernesto in her arms (Fanny had not yet been born) took me out on Montagnone, and sat down on the grass on the vast square in front of Via Scandiana, from the top of which one could just barely make out our house’s roof from among the sea of roofs around the big jetty of the church of Santa Maria in Vado, it was with considerable fear, I remember, that I went to lean on the parapet that skirted the square on the side nearest the country, and looked down over a drop of some thirty meters. Someone was always climbing up or down that dizzyingly steep wall: farmers, manual workers, young bricklayers, each of them with a bicycle on his shoulders. Amongst them were old men too, moustachioed frog-catchers and catfish anglers, laden with rods and baskets, all of them inhabitants of Quacchio, of Ponte della Gradella, of Coccomaro, of Coccomarino, of Focomorto, all of them in a hurry, and rather than go the long way by Porta San Giorgio or Porta San Giovanni (because at that time, on that side, the ramparts were still intact, without any penetrable breaches for at least five kilometers) they preferred to take, as they called it, “the wall route.” They left the city, in that case, by crossing the great square, passing me by without even noticing me, stepping over the parapet and letting themselves drop until the tips of their toes rested on the first outcrop or crevice in the decrepit wall, and then, in no time at all, they would reach the meadow below. They came from the country; and then they would come up with those narrowed eyes that seemed to me to be boring into my own as I peeped timidly over the parapet—but I was quite wrong about that as they were understandably only focusing on the next handhold. Always, in any case, all the time they were thus occupied, suspended over the abyss—a pair of them, usually, one following the other—I would hear them chattering away in dialect, no more or less perturbed than if they had been trudging along a footpath in the middle of some fields. How calm, strong and brave they were!—I’d tell myself. After they had come up to within a few inches of my face, mirroring it in their own sclerotic ones, more often than not I was enveloped in the wine-reek of their breath, as they grasped with their thick callused fingers the inner edge of the parapet, as their whole bodies emerged out of the void and—lo and behold!—there they were safe and sound. I’d never be able to do such a thing, I told myself every time, watching them move away, full of admiration but also a kind of recoil. Never ever.
It was the same type of feeling I was once more experiencing just then in front of the outer wall on top of which Micòl was inviting me to climb. The wall certainly did not look as high as the ramparts of Montagnone. But all the same it was smoother, a good deal less corroded with the years and the inclement weather. And what if, scrambling up there, I thought to myself, my eyes fixed on those “notches” Micòl had pointed out to me, what if faintness overcame me and I was to fall? I might easily be killed.
However it was not so much for that reason that I still hesitated. Holding me back was a different repugnance than the purely physical one of vertigo, analogous but different, and stronger at that. For a moment I began to repent of my so recent desperation, my stupid puerile laments of a boy who had “failed.”
“And besides, I don’t see why here of all places I should force myself to become an Alpine mountaineer. If I’m being invited into your house, I’m very grateful but, frankly, it seems to me a whole lot easier to enter over there,” and saying this I lifted my arm in the direction of Corso Ercole I d’Este, “through the main entrance. It would hardly take a moment. I’ll get the bike and be there in no time.”
I immediately understood that this proposal was not to her liking.
“No . . . no . . . ” she said, contorting her face in an expression of intense distaste, “if you go that way Perotti’s bound to see you, and then that will be it, there’ll be no more fun in the whole thing.”
“Perotti? Who’s he?”
“The doorkeeper . . . you know. Perhaps you’ve already seen him. He’s the one who’s also the coachman, and accompanies us as a chauffeur. If he sees you, and there’s no way he won’t see you, since, apart from the times he goes out with the carriage or the car, he’s always there on guard, damn him! And after that, it absolutely means I’ll have to take you into the house as well, and you tell me if that’s . . . what do you think?”
She was looking straight into my eyes, serious now, even though as calm as could be.
“All right,” I replied, turning my head and nodding toward the embankment, “but what should I do with my bike? It’s not like I can just leave it there, untended. It’s brand new, a Wolsit: with dynamo lights, a saddlebag with a repair kit and a pump—do you think I’d let them steal my bike—on top of everything else . . . ”
I didn’t finish my sentence, struck down once more with anxiety about my inevitable confrontation with my father. That very evening, as late as possible, I’d have to return home. What other choice did I have?
I’d turned my eyes toward Micòl while I was speaking: she had seated herself on the wall, with her back turned toward me. Now she confidently lifted her leg and sat astride it.
“What are you up to?” I asked, surprised.
“I’ve just had an idea about your bike, and in the meantime I’ll show you the best places to put your feet. Pay attention to where I’m putting mine. Look!”
She vaulted nonchalantly over onto the top of the wall, and thence, grabbing hold of the big rusty nail she had shown me before, began to climb down. She came down slowly but surely, searching out the footholds with the tips of her little tennis shoes, now with one, now with the other, and always finding them without apparent effort. She climbed down gracefully. All the same, before touching the ground, she missed one foothold, and slid the rest of the way. She fell on her feet but had hurt the fingers of one hand, and also, grazing the wall, her little pink dress—for the seaside—had been torn slightly under the arm.
“What a fool I am,” she grumbled, bringing her hand to her mouth and blowing on it. “It’s the first time that’s happened to me.”
She had cut her knee as well. She drew up a fold of her dress far enough to uncover her strangely white and strong-looking thigh, already a woman’s, and she leaned over to examine the scratch. Two long blonde locks, the fairer ones, escaped from the clip she used to keep them bound together, fell down over her face, hiding her forehead and eyes.
“What a fool,” she repeated.
“You’ll need some disinfectant,” I said mechanically, without approaching her, in that slightly plaintive tone that, in our family, we all used for this kind of thing.
“Disinfectant? You must be joking!”
She quickly licked the wound, a sort of affectionate kiss, and immediately sat up straight.
“Come on then,” she said, all red and ruffled.
She turned, and began to climb up sideways along the bank’s sunlit edge. She used her right hand to steady herself, grasping tufts of grass; meanwhile, her left hand, raised to her head, was undoing and refitting her circular hairclip. She repeated the maneuver several times as fluently as though she were combing her hair.
“Do you see that hole there?” she asked me, as soon as we’d arrived at the top. “You can hide your bike in there. No problem.”
She pointed out to me, about fifty meters away, one of those grassy, cone-shaped hillocks, not more than two meters high, with an opening that is nearly always buried, which you come across quite frequently going round the walls of Ferrara. At first sight, they look a bit like the Etruscan burial mounds of the Roman countryside, though obviously on a much smaller scale. Except that the often huge underground chambers which some of them lead to have never housed any of the dead. The a
ncient defenders of the walls used them to store their arms: culverins, arquebuses, gunpowder and so on. And perhaps also those odd cannon balls of much-prized marble which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had made the Ferrarese artillery so feared across Europe, and some examples of which you can still see in the castle, lying there like ornaments in the central courtyard and on the terraces.
“Who would dream that there could be a new Wolsit hidden down there? You’d have to have been told. Have you ever been inside?”
I shook my head.
“No? I have. Hundreds of times. It’s awesome.”
She moved on decisively, and having picked the Wolsit off the ground, I followed her in silence.
I drew level with her at the threshold of the opening. It was a kind of vertical crack, cut directly into the mantle of grass with which the mound was thickly clad, and too narrow to permit the entry of more than one person at a time. Immediately beyond the threshold began the descent, and one could only see down into it eight, maybe ten meters, but no more than that. Beyond there was nothing but darkness. As though the underground passage came up against a black curtain.
She leaned in to look, then suddenly turned round to me.
“You go on down,” she whispered, smiling weakly, embarrassed. “I’d prefer to wait up here.”
She drew back, linking her hands behind her back, and leaning her back against the grassy wall beside the entry.
“It’s not like you’re scared?” she asked, still in lowered tones.
“No, no,” I lied, and bent down to lift the bike onto my shoulders.
Without saying another word I went past her, heading on into the tunnel.
I had to move carefully, also because the bicycle pedal kept knocking against the wall; and to begin with, for at least two or three meters, it was as though I’d been blinded: I could see absolutely nothing. But ten or so meters from the entrance hole (“Be careful,” I heard Micòl’s already distant shout behind me, then: “Mind the steps there!”) I began to make out something. The tunnel came to an end a short space ahead: it only continued for a few more meters in descent. And it was just there, beyond a kind of landing which I sensed, even before arriving, was surrounded by a completely different kind of space, that the stairs which Micòl had warned me of began.
When I reached the landing, I stopped for a moment.
The infantile fear of the dark and the unknown which I’d felt the moment I’d moved away from Micòl as I ventured slowly farther and farther into the bowels of the earth gradually gave way to a no less infantile sense of relief. As though, having left Micòl’s company, I had just in time escaped some great danger, the greatest danger a boy of my age (“a boy of your age” was one of my father’s favorite expressions) might ever meet. Oh yes, I thought, this evening when I get home my Papa may well beat me. But at this point I could easily face his blows with equanimity. A subject to retake in October, Micòl was right, was just a joke. What was a subject in October compared to, I trembled, all those things that might have taken place between us, down here, in the dark? Perhaps I would have had the courage to give her, Micòl, a kiss: a kiss on the lips. But then what? What would have happened next? In the films I’d seen, and in novels, kisses had to be long and passionate! Actually, compared to “all those things,” kisses were merely a not-too-worrying detail, if after lips met, and the two mouths were joined, each seeming almost to enter the other, mostly the thread of the story would not be picked up again until the next morning, or even not until several days later. If Micòl and I had managed to kiss each other in that way—and the darkness might certainly have helped things along—after that kiss time would have continued to move at its usual stately pace without any strange or providential interruption arriving to transport us safely to the morning after. In that case, what would I have had to do to fill up the minutes and hours that lay between? Oh, but that hadn’t happened, luckily. It was just as well I’d been saved.
I began to descend the steps. I now realized that some faint rays of light from behind were filtering down through the tunnel. So a little by sight and a little by hearing (the bike had only to knock against the wall, or my heel to slip on a step, and immediately an echo increased and multiplied the sound, measuring out the spaces and distances), I quite quickly came to sense the sheer vastness of the place. It must have been a chamber some forty meters in diameter, round, with a vaulted dome of at least the same height. Who knows, perhaps it communicated by way of a system of secret corridors with other underground chambers of the same type, dozens of them, nestled under the body of the walls. Nothing could have been easier to imagine.
The chamber floor was of beaten earth, smooth, compact and dank. As I groped along the curve of the walls, I stumbled on a brick, and trod down on some straw. At last I sat down, resting with one hand gripping the wheel of the bike I’d leaned against the wall, and the other arm around my knees. The silence was only broken by the occasional rustle and squeak: rats probably, or bats . . .
And if the other things had happened, if they had, would that really have been so terrible?
It was almost a certainty I wouldn’t have gone back home, and my parents, and Otello Forti, and Sergio Pavani, and all the others, the police station included, would have then had a real hunt to find me! For the first few days they’d have worn themselves out looking everywhere. Even the newspapers would have reported it, bringing up the usual hypotheses: kidnap, mishap, suicide, clandestine flight abroad, and so on. Little by little, however, things would have calmed down. My parents would have finally been reconciled to the loss (after all, they still had Ernesto and Fanny), and the search would have been called off. And, in the end, the person who’d be held responsible would have been that stupid sanctimonious Signora Fabiani, who’d have been sent off to “some other placement” as punishment. Where? To Sicily or Sardinia, naturally. It would have served her right, and taught her not to be so sneaky and spiteful.
As for me, seeing everyone else had become so reconciled to my absence, I would get used to it as well. I could rely on Micòl outside: she would have been able to provide me with food and everything else I needed. And she would have come every day, climbing over her garden wall, summer and winter. And every day we would have kissed, in the dark, because I was her man, and she was my woman.
And anyway, who was to say I wouldn’t go outside ever again? During the day, obviously, I’d sleep, only interrupting my slumbers when I felt Micòl’s lips brushing my own, and later I’d fall asleep again with her in my arms. By night, however, I could easily make prolonged sorties, especially if I chose the hours after one or two o’clock, when everyone else would be asleep, and almost no one left on the city streets. It would be odd and scary, but in the end good fun, to pass by Via Scandiana, see our house again, and the window of my bedroom, by this stage converted into a kind of sitting room, and then to make out in the distance, hidden in shadow, my father just then returning from the Merchants’ Club, and it wouldn’t even cross his mind I was alive and watching him. In fact, there he was taking the keys out of his pocket—opening the door, entering, and then calmly, just as though I, his eldest child, had never existed, shutting the door with a single hefty push.
And Mamma? Would it not be possible, one day or another, for me to try to let her know, perhaps by way of Micòl, that I wasn’t really dead? And even to see her, before, fed up of my life underground, I finally left Ferrara and disappeared for ever? Why not? What was to stop me!
I don’t know how long I remained there. Perhaps ten minutes, perhaps less. I remember precisely that as I climbed up the stairs and threaded the tunnel again (without the weight of the bicycle I moved far more nimbly) I kept on embellishing these fantasies. And Mamma?—I asked myself. Would she also have forgotten me, like the rest of them?
Finally I found myself in the open air again, and Micòl was no longer waiting for me where I’d left her a little before, but rather, as I saw almost at once, screening my eyes against t
he sun with my hand, was once more sitting astride the garden wall of the Barchetto del Duca.
She seemed busy arguing and reasoning with someone on the other side of the wall: probably the coachman Perotti, or even Professor Ermanno in person. It was clear what had happened: seeing the ladder leaning against the wall, they must have immediately been aware of her little escape. Now they were asking her to come down. And she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to obey.
At a certain point, she turned round, and spotted me on top of the bank. Then she blew out her cheeks as if to say:
“Phew! About time!”
And the last look she gave before disappearing behind the wall—a look accompanied with a smile and a wink, just as when, at the synagogue, she spied me from under the paternal tallit—had been for me.
* Tenth anniversary of the Fascist Party’s assumption of power. This 1933 decree opened up the Fascist Party to public membership, and many Ferrarese Jews joined it at this time.
† Municipal chief of justice and police during the Fascist era.
‡ One of those who were Fascists before the 1922 March on Rome.
§ Fascist youth organization.
¶ A type of middle school in Italy that pupils attended from the ages of fourteen to sixteen.
# O blonde, O beautiful empress, O trusted one.
** Where have you come from? Which past centuries / Have bestowed you on us, you so mild and beautiful . . .
†† Ferrarese dialect: literally, “black (or benighted) Gentiles.”
‡‡ Congregation of a minimum of ten adult males.
§§ Prayer shawl; plural, tallitot.
¶¶ Mixture of Spanish and Venetian dialect: “What are you up to? Come on, Giulio, get up, will you! And make the boy stand up as well . . .”
## Ferrara Jewish dialect: “bigotry.”
*** Hebrew: “blessing.”
††† Hebrew: “God bless and keep you . . .”
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