The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  • 1 •

  THE time when I actually managed to pass beyond the wall surrounding the Barchetto del Duca, and make my way between the trees and clearings of the great private wood as far as the magna domus itself and the tennis court, was something like ten years later.

  It was in 1938, about two months after the Racial Laws had been passed. I remember it well. One afternoon toward the end of October, a few minutes after having left the table, I’d received a telephone call from Alberto Finzi-Contini. Was it or wasn’t it true, he immediately wanted to know, dispensing with any preamble (it is worth noting that for more than five years we had had no occasion to exchange a single word)—was it or wasn’t it true that I “and all the others,” with a letter signed by the vice-president and secretary of the Eleonora d’Este Tennis Club, had all been banned from the club: “thrown out” as it were?

  I denied this firmly: it wasn’t true. At least, as far as I was concerned; I’d received no such letter.

  As though he considered my denial of no consequence, or wasn’t even willing to listen to it, he immediately proposed that I should come round to play at their house. If I could put up with a white clay court, he went on, with not much in the way of surrounds; and if, above all, given that I was sure to be a far better player than them, I could “be kind enough” to give him and Micòl a knock-up, both of them would be very glad and “honored.” Any afternoon at all would be fine, he added, if the idea appealed to me. Today, tomorrow, the day after—I could come when I wanted, bringing with me whoever I wanted, even on Saturday, if that was better. He had to stay in Ferrara for at least another month, since the Milan Polytechnic courses wouldn’t be starting until November 20 (as for Micòl, she was taking things easier and easier—taking an extra year for her History exams, and having no need to go around begging official signatures, who knows if she’d even set foot in the department at Ca’ Foscari) and didn’t I see what lovely weather we were having? While there was still time, it would be a real waste not to make the most of it.

  He sounded these last words with less conviction. It seemed as though he had felt the chill of some less pleasant thought, or a sudden, unmotivated feeling of boredom had descended to make him wish that I wouldn’t come round or take any notice of his invitation.

  I thanked him, without clearly committing myself to anything. What was the call about?—I asked myself in some consternation, putting down the phone. All considered, since the time he and his sister had been sent to study outside Ferrara (Alberto in 1933, Micòl in 1934, more or less the same years that Professor Ermanno had been given permission by the Community to restore for “the use of the family and others concerned” the former Spanish synagogue which was incorporated in the Via Mazzini Temple, and from then on the bench behind ours in the Italian School synagogue had remained empty) we hadn’t seen each other except on rare occasions, and those only briefly and at a distance. During this whole time we had become so remote from each other that one morning in 1935, at Bologna station (I was already in the second year of my Arts course and I went back and forth almost every day by train), having been brusquely shouldered aside on platform one by a dark-haired, pale-faced young man, with a tartan blanket under his arm, and with a porter laden with baggage at his heels, who was propelling himself with big strides toward the fast train to Milan about to leave, for a moment I completely failed to recognize this figure as Alberto Finzi-Contini. And that time—I continued thinking—he had not even felt the least need to greet me. When I had turned round to protest at being knocked over, he merely gave me a distracted glance. And now, by contrast, what was all this effusive and slippery courtesy about?

  “Who was it?” my father asked, as soon as I had entered the dining room.

  There was no one else in the room. He was sitting in an armchair next to the sideboard with the radio, as usual anxiously awaiting the two o’clock news.

  “Alberto Finzi-Contini.”

  “Who? The boy? Such an honor! And what did he want?”

  He scrutinized me with his blue, bewildered eyes, which a long time ago had lost hope of my obedience, trying to guess what was going on in my mind. He well knew—his eyes were telling me—that his questions got on my nerves, that his continual attempts to meddle in my life were without discretion or justification. But good God, wasn’t he my father? And hadn’t I noticed how he’d grown old this last year? It wasn’t possible for him to confide in Mamma and in Fanny: they were women. Nor could he do so in Ernesto—too much of a baby. So who then could he talk to? Was it possible I didn’t understand it was me he needed?

  Through clenched teeth I told him what the call had been about.

  “And will you be going, then?”

  He didn’t give me a chance to answer him. Regardless, with all the animation I saw in him at the slightest chance offered him to drag me into any kind of conversation, especially of a political nature, he’d already rushed headlong into a résumé of what he called “the real point of the situation.”

  It was unfortunately true—he had begun to recapitulate in his tireless way—last September, on the 22nd, after the first official announcement on the 9th, all the newspapers had published that additional circular from the Party Secretary which spoke of various “practical measures” of immediate application for which the provincial Federations would be responsible with regard to us. In future, “the prohibition of mixed marriages remaining statutory, the exclusion of all youths, recognized as belonging to the Jewish race, from all state schools of whatever kind and level,” as well as the exemption, for the same, from the “highly honorific” duty of military service, we “Israelites” would then not even be able to place our death announcements in the newspapers, let alone be listed in telephone directories, or keep domestic help of the Aryan race, or frequent “recreational clubs” of any kind whatsoever. And yet, despite all this . . .

  “I hope you won’t want to start on the usual story,” I interrupted him, shaking my head.

  “What story?”

  “That Mussolini is more good than Hitler.”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “But you have to admit it’s true. Hitler’s a bloodthirsty maniac, whereas Mussolini is what he is, as much of a Machiavellian and turncoat as can be, but . . . ”

  Again I interrupted him. Did he or did he not agree, I asked, looking him straight in the face, with the idea of Leon Trotsky’s essay I’d “passed” to him a few days earlier?

  I was referring to an article published in an old issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, a magazine several entire years of which I jealously guarded in my bedroom. What had happened was that, I can’t remember why, I had treated my father disrespectfully. He was offended, had gone into such a sulk that, at a certain point, hoping to re-establish normal relations, I could think of no other strategy than to make him privy to my most recent reading. Flattered by this sign of respect, my father did not need to be persuaded. He read the article straight away, rather he devoured it, underlining with a pencil a great many lines, and filling the margins with pages of dense notes. Basically, and this he declared openly, the writings of “that reprobate and ancient best mate of Lenin” had been for him, too, a real revelation.

  “But of course I agree with it!” he exclaimed, happy, and at the same time disconcerted, to see me inclined to have a discussion. “There’s no doubt about it—Trotsky’s a magnificent polemicist. What vividness and powers of expression! Quite capable of composing the article straight in French. Sure,” here he smiled with pride, “those Russian and Polish Jews may not be very likeable, but they’ve always had an indisputable genius for languages. They have it in their blood.”

  “Let’s drop the question of language and get down to the arguments.” I cut him short with a sour professorial tone which I immediately regretted.

  The article spoke clearly—I continued, more placidly. In its phases of imperialist expansion, capitalism is bound to manifest its intolerance regarding all national minorities, and the Jew
s in particular, who are the minority par excellence. And now, in the light of this general theory (Trotsky’s essay was written in 1931, which shouldn’t be forgotten: that is, the year in which Hitler’s real ascent to power began), what did it matter whether Mussolini was a better person than Hitler? And anyway, was it really true that he was better, even in terms of character?

  “I see. I see . . . ” my father kept on meekly repeating as I spoke.

  His eyelids were lowered, his face screwed up into a grimace of pained forbearance. At last, when he was quite sure I had nothing further to add, he placed his hand on my knee.

  He could see—he repeated once again, slowly raising his eyelids. If I’d just let him speak: I took everything too grimly, I was too extreme.

  How come I didn’t realize that after the communiqué of September 9, and more particularly after the additional circular of the 22nd, things at least in Ferrara had gone ahead almost as before? It was quite true, he admitted, smiling melancholically, that during that month, among the seven hundred and fifty members of the Community there had been no deaths considered worthy of record in the Corriere padano (if he wasn’t wrong, only two old ladies from the Via Vittoria Hospice had died: a certain Saralvo and a Rietti, and the latter wasn’t even from Ferrara but from a Mantuan village—Sabbioneta, Viadana, Pomponesco, or something like that). But we should be fair: the telephone directory had not been withdrawn to be replaced by a newly purged edition. There had not yet been any havertà,* maid, cook, nanny or old governess, in service to any of our families, who, all of a sudden discovering in themselves “a racial awareness” had felt it imperative to pack her bags. The Merchants’ Club, which had had the lawyer Lattes as its vice-president for more than ten years, and which he had frequented constantly on an almost daily basis, had recorded no such walk-outs to date. And Bruno Lattes, son of Leone Lattes, had he by any chance been expelled from the Eleonora d’Este Tennis Club? Without giving the least thought to my brother Ernesto, who, poor thing, had been all this time watching me with his mouth ajar, imitating me as though I was who knows what great haham,† I had given up playing tennis, and I had done wrong, if I’d let him say so, very wrong to close myself off, to segregate myself, not to go out to see anyone anymore, and then, with the excuse of university and a seasonal rail card, to continually sneak off to Bologna (and I wasn’t even willing to spend time with Nino Bottecchiari, Sergio Pavani and Otello Forti, up until last year my inseparable friends, here in Ferrara, yes, they hadn’t stopped phoning me, first one and then the other, poor boys!) I should consider, in contrast, young Lattes. If the Corriere padano was to be believed, he had not only taken part in the open tournament but also in the mixed doubles, playing with his partner, the lovely Adriana Trentini, daughter of the province’s chief engineer. He was doing exceptionally well—they’d already got through the first three rounds and were now getting ready for the semi-finals. No, you can say what you want about good old Barbicinti, such as that he sets too much store by his own petty nobility’s coat of arms and too little store by the grammar of the tennis propaganda articles which the Federal Secretary gets him to write every now and then for the Padano. But that he was a gentleman, not at all hostile to Jews, a harmless enough Fascist—and in saying “harmless enough Fascist” my father’s voice trembled, a little tremor of timidity—as far as that’s concerned there’s no doubt or cause for dispute.

  As regards Alberto’s invitation, and the behavior of the Finzi-Continis in general, what was it for, out of the blue, all their fussing, all their almost frantic neediness to make contact?

  What had happened the week before for Rosh Hashanah at the Temple had already been strange enough (as usual, I hadn’t wished to go, and once again had put myself in the wrong). Yes, it was already strange enough, at the climax of the service and with the seats almost all taken, to see Ermanno Finzi-Contini, his wife and even his sister-in-law, followed by the two children and the inevitable uncles, the Herreras from Venice—in short, the whole tribe, without distinctions of gender, make their solemn return to the Italian School after a good five years of scornful isolation in the Spanish synagogue. They had a look about them too, benign and satisfied, no more or less than if they had meant, by their presence, to reward and pardon not only the assembled company but the entire Community. And this alone was apparently not sufficient. For now they’d reached the point of inviting people to their home, to the Barchetto del Duca, just imagine, where since the days of Josette Artom, no fellow citizen or outsider had ever set foot, except perhaps in situations of dire emergency. And did I care to know why? Of course, because they were pleased with what was happening! Because to them, halti‡ as they’d always been (anti-Fascist, sure, but above all halti), deep down the Racial Laws gratified them! Had they been good Zionists one could have understood! Given that here in Italy, and in Ferrara, they always found themselves so ill at ease, so out of place, they could at least have benefited from this situation and taken themselves off, once and for all, to Eretz! But not at all. Apart from fumbling every now and then for a wee bit of cash to send to Eretz (which was nothing to boast of, anyway), the thought of going had never even crossed their minds. They had always reserved their serious bits of spending for aristocratic baubles: as when, in 1933, to find an hekhal and a parokhet§ worthy of a place in their private synagogue (authentic Sephardic furnishings, I ask you—not Portuguese, or Catalan, or Provençal, but real Spanish and to the exact measurement!), they rushed off in a motor car, dragging a Carnera truck behind them to no less a place than Cherasco, in the province of Cuneo, a village which up until 1910 or earlier had been the dwelling of a small Jewish community now extinct, and where the cemetery was only still functioning because some Turin families who’d originated there, Debenedetti, Momigliano, Terracini and so on, kept on burying their dead there. Likewise Josette Artom, Alberto and Micòl’s grandmother, in her time, unceasingly imported palms and eucalyptuses from the Botanical Gardens of Rome, the one at the foot of the Janiculum—and because of this and needless to say for reasons of prestige, had forced her husband, poor Menotti, to at least double the width of the already exaggerated gateway that gave onto Corso Ercole I d’Este. The truth is that their mania for collections, of things, of plants, of whatever, little by little ends up with them wanting to do the same with people. Huh! And if they, the Finzi-Continis, so missed being stuck in a ghetto (and the Ghetto—that’s where they clearly want to have everyone locked away, even if it meant making a sacrifice for this wonderful ideal and parcelling out bits of the Barchetto del Duca to make a kind of kibbutz of it, of course under their noble patronage), they should feel perfectly free to go ahead and make one. Speaking for himself, and quite sincerely, he’d much prefer to go to Palestine. Or better still Alaska, Tierra del Fuego or Madagascar . . .

  That was a Tuesday. I can’t explain how, a few days later, on the Saturday, I decided to do exactly the opposite of what my father wanted. I’d deny that it had to do with the typical filial mechanism of contradiction and disobedience. What suddenly prompted me to drag out my racket and tennis gear from the drawer they had lain in for more than a year had been nothing other than a luminous day, the light and caressing air of an early autumnal afternoon, unusually sunny.

  But in the meantime certain things had happened.

  First of all, two days after Alberto’s call, I think, and so it must have been Thursday, the letter that “welcomed” my resignation as a member of the Eleonora d’Este Tennis Club had actually arrived. Typed, but with the signature, in full spread, of NH¶ Marchese Barbicinti at the foot of the page, the express delivery did not descend to personal or particular details. In the driest tone, and a mere few lines, clumsily mimicking a bureaucratic style, it went straight to the point, declaring it without doubt “inadmissible” (sic) any further attendance of my “esteemed person” at the Club. (Could the Marchese Barbicinti ever rid himself of the habit of peppering his prose with certain spelling mistakes? It seems not. But taking note of and laug
hing about them was a bit more difficult this time than it had been in the past.)

  And secondly, the next day, there had been another phone call for me from the magna domus, and not from Alberto, this time, but from Micòl.

  The outcome was a long, no, an extremely long conversation, the tone of which was maintained, thanks mainly to Micòl, along the lines of a normal, ironic, rambling chat between two seasoned university students who, as children, might even have had a bit of a crush on one another, but who now, after something in the region of ten years, have nothing else in mind than to bring about an innocent get-together.

  “How long is it since we’ve seen each other?”

  “At the very least five years.”

  “And so, what are you like now?”

  “Ugly. A spinster with a red nose. And you? On the subject, I read, I read . . . ”

  “Read what?”

  “That’s it. Two or so years ago, in the Padano, must have been the culture page, that you’d participated in the Venice Littoriali della Cultura e dell’Arte. . . Making a bit of a splash, eh? My compliments! But then you always did very well in Italian, even at upper middle school. Meldolesi was truly spellbound by some of your class essays. I seem to recall he even brought us one to read.”

  “No need to make fun of me. And you, what are you up to?”

  “Nothing. I should have graduated in English at Ca’ Foscari last June. But instead—fat chance. Let’s hope I can get through this year, idleness permitting. D’you think they’ll let the students who are late for their exams finish anyway?”

  “I haven’t the least doubt about that, though my saying so won’t cheer you up. Have you chosen the subject for your thesis yet?”

  “I’ve chosen, so far no more than chosen, to do it on Emily Dickinson—you know, the nineteenth-century American poet, that archetypally awful woman . . . but what can you do? I’ll have to be tied to the Professor’s apron strings, waste a whole fortnight in Venice, the Pearl of the Lagoon—but a short while there’s enough for me . . . All these years I’ve stayed there as little as possible. Besides, to be honest, studying’s never been my forte.”