The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  Later, when tree-spotting was exhausted, “the pious pilgrimages” began. And since all pilgrimages, according to Micòl, had to be undertaken on foot (otherwise what kind of pilgrimages would they be, for heaven’s sake?), we stopped using our bikes. And so we would walk, nearly always accompanied every step of the way by Jor.

  To start with I was taken to see a small, lone landing-stage on the Panfilio canal, hidden amongst a thick growth of willows, white poplars and arum lilies. From that tiny dock, completely encircled by a mossy terracotta bench, it was likely that in the old days they might have set sail for the River Po as well as for the Castle Moat. And she and Alberto themselves had even set sail from there when they were children, Micòl told me, for long excursions in a two-paddle canoe. By boat, they had never got as far as the foot of the Castle towers (I was quite aware that nowadays the Panfilio only reached the Castle Moat by way of underwater channels). But that hadn’t stopped them getting as far as the Po, right up to Isola Bianca. Now, ça va sans dire, there was no point in thinking of using the canoe anymore: it was partly stove in, covered in dust, reduced to being “the ghost of a canoe.” Sometime I’d be able to see it in the coach-house when she remembered to take me there. However, the landing-stage bench she’d always, always, kept going back to. Perhaps because she was still using it to prepare for her exams, utterly undisturbed, when it was hot, or perhaps because . . . The fact was that this spot had always remained in some way hers, and hers only—her own secret refuge.

  Another time we ended up at the Perottis, who lived in a real farmhouse between the big house and the fruit groves.

  We were received by old Perotti’s wife, Vittorina, a sad, wan-looking arzdòra,¶¶ thin as a rake and of an indefinable age, and by Italia, the wife of Titta, the elder son. She was a plump, robust thirty-year-old from Codigoro, with light-blue, watery eyes and red hair. Seated on the threshold in a wicker chair, and surrounded by a crowd of chickens, she was breast-feeding, and Micòl leaned down to caress the baby.

  As she did so, she asked Vittorina in dialect: “And so, when are you going to ask me back to eat some more of that bean soup?”

  “Whenever you’d like, Sgnurina. Long as you’re happy with . . .”

  “We should really arrange it one of these days,” Micòl replied seriously. “You ought to know,” she added turning to me, “that Vittorina makes these monster bean soups. With braised pork crackling of course . . .”

  She laughed and said:

  “D’you want to have a look at the cowshed? We have a good half-dozen cows.”

  Preceded by Vittorina we made our way toward the cowshed. The arzdòra opened the door with a huge key she kept in the pocket of her black apron, then stepped aside to let us pass. As we crossed the threshold I was aware of a furtive look she gave the two of us—a look that seemed troubled but at the same time secretly pleased.

  A third pilgrimage was devoted to the sacred places of the “vert paradis des amours enfantines.”

  In the previous days we had passed by those parts several times, but always on bikes, and never stopping there. There it is—Micòl then told me, pointing with her finger—the very spot on the outer wall where she used to lean the ladder, and there were the “notches” (“Yes sir, the notches”) she’d use when, as it fell out, the ladder wasn’t available.

  “Don’t you think we should have a commemorative plaque placed here?” she asked me.

  “I suppose you’ll have already worked out the wording.”

  “It’s almost there. ‘Here in this place, avoiding the vigilance of two enormous hounds . . .’ ”

  “Stop. You were mentioning a plaque, but from the way it’s going I reckon you’ll need a big inscription stone like the Bollettino della Vittoria. The second line’s far too long.”

  A quarrel sprang from this. I took the part of the stubborn interrupter, and she, raising her voice and behaving like a spoiled child, went on to accuse me of the “usual pedantry.” It was clear—she cried out—that I’d sniffed out her intention to leave my name off the plaque, and so, out of pure jealousy, I wasn’t even willing to hear her out.

  Then we calmed down. She began once more to talk of when she and Alberto were children. If I really wanted to know the truth, both she and Alberto had always felt equally envious of those, like me, who had the good fortune to study in a state school. Didn’t I believe her? It had come to such a point with them that every year they anxiously awaited exam time just for the pleasure of being able to go to school like other children.

  “Then how come, if you both so wanted to go to school, you went on studying at home?” I asked.

  “Papa and Mamma, particularly Mamma, were dead set against it. Mamma has always had an obsession with germs. She claimed that schools were specially made to disseminate the most frightful diseases, and it never helped at all that Uncle Giulio, whenever he came here, tried to persuade her that this wasn’t so. Uncle Giulio would tease her, even though he’s a doctor, and doesn’t have much faith in medicine, but rather believes in the inevitability and usefulness of diseases. There was no way that he could convince Mamma, after the great misfortune of Guido, our little older brother who died before Alberto and I were born, in 1914. After that he didn’t dare touch on the subject! Later, as you can guess, we rebelled a bit: we managed to go to university, the two of us, and even to Austria to ski, one winter, as I think I’ve already told you. But as children, what could we do? I often used to escape (but not Alberto—he’s always been a good deal more placid than me, and much more obedient). Besides, one day I stayed out a bit too long, on a trip round the walls, getting a lift from a group of boys on their bicycle crossbars. When I got home, and saw how desperate they were, Mamma and Papa, from that time on (as Micòl was such a good sort, with a heart of gold!) from that time on, I decided to be well behaved and have never slipped off again. The only relapse was that June of 1929 in your honor, my dear sir!”

  “And I thought I was the only one,” I sighed.

  “Well, if not the only one, certainly the last. And besides, as far as entering the garden goes, I’ve never invited anyone else in.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “I swear it is. I was always looking in your direction, at the Temple . . . when you turned round to talk to Papa and Alberto you had such blue eyes! In my heart of hearts I’d even given you a nickname.”

  “A nickname? And what would that be?”

  “Celestino.”

  “Che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto## I stammered.

  “Exactly!” she exclaimed, laughing. “All the same, I think for some time I had a little crush on you.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Then life separated us.”

  “What an idea though—to put up a synagogue just for yourselves. Was that still all because of a fear of germs?”

  She signaled agreement with her hand.

  “Well . . . more or less . . . ” she said.

  “D’you mean more?”

  Yet there was no way to make her confess the truth. I was well aware that the reason Professor Ermanno, in 1933, had asked to restore the Spanish synagogue for his and his family’s use had been the shameful infornata del Decennale. It was this that made him do it. She, however, maintained that once more the crucial factor was her mother’s will. The Herreras, in Venice, belonged to the Spanish School. And since her mother, grandma Regina and her uncles Giulio and Federico had always been most attached to family traditions, her father, to keep her mother happy . . .

  “But now, how come you’ve returned to the Italian School?” I objected. “I wasn’t there at the Temple on the evening of Rosh Hashanah—I haven’t set foot in there for at least three years. Though my father, who was there, has described the event to me in the smallest detail.”

  “Oh, have no fear, your absence has been greatly noticed, Sir Free-Thinker!” she replied. “By me as well.”

  She became serious again and said:

  “What d�
��you expect? . . . now we’re all in the same boat. At this point even I’d find it rather ridiculous to keep on trying to preserve so many distinctions.”

  On another day, the last, it began to rain, and while the others took refuge in the Hütte playing rummy or ping-pong, the two of us, unconcerned about getting soaked, ran halfway across the park to shelter in the coach-house. The coach-house served now only as a storeroom—Micòl had told me. At one time, however, a good half of the inner chamber had been kitted out as a gym, with climbing poles, ropes, symmetrical bars, rings, wall bars and so on—all this with the sole intent that she and Alberto might present themselves well prepared for the annual exam in physical education. They weren’t exactly serious lessons, the ones Professor Anacleto Zaccarini, who had been pensioned off years before and was more than eighty (just imagine it!) came to give them every week. But they were certainly amusing, perhaps more so than all the others. She never forgot to bring along to the gym a bottle of Bosco wine. And old Zaccarini, gradually turning from his usual ruddy-nosed and red-cheeked self to a peacock-purple, would slowly drain it to the last drop. Some winter evenings when he left, he looked as though he was actually emitting his own light . . .

  It was a long, low construction of brown bricks, with two side windows defended by sturdy grilles, a leaking tile roof and its external walls almost entirely covered by ivy. Not far from Perotti’s hayloft and the glassy parallelepiped of a greenhouse, its approach was through a broad, green-painted gate which looked out toward the opposite part of the Mura degli Angeli in the direction of the main house.

  We stopped for a while on the threshold with our backs to the big door. The rain was pelting down in long diagonal streaks, on the lawns, on the huge black masses of the trees, on everything. It was cold. Our teeth chattering, we both looked around us. The enchantment which had till then held the season in suspense had been irreparably broken.

  “Should we go in?” I finally proposed. “It’ll be warmer inside.”

  Within the vast chamber, at the end of which, in shadow, shone the tops of two polished, blond climbing poles that stretched to the ceiling, a strange smell diffused itself, a mixture of petrol, lubricating oil, old dust and citrus fruits. It’s such a good smell, Micòl suddenly said, aware that I was inhaling it deeply. She also liked it very much. And she pointed out to me, leaning against a side wall, a kind of high scaffolding of dark wood, groaning under the weight of big, round, yellow fruit, bigger than oranges and lemons, which I hadn’t noticed before. They were grapefruit, hung there to season, she explained, produced in the greenhouse. Had I never tried them?—she then asked, taking one and offering it me to sniff. It was a shame she didn’t have a knife with her to cut it into two “hemispheres.” The taste of the juice was a hybrid: it was both like orange and lemon, with an additional bitterness all its own.

  The center of the coach-house was taken up by two vehicles: one long grey Dilambda and a blue carriage whose uplifted shafts were only just lower than the climbing poles behind.

  “Now we don’t use the carriage anymore,” Micòl remarked. “On the few occasions Papa has to go into the country he goes by car. And the same for me and Alberto when we have to go—he to Milan, me to Venice. It’s the unflagging Perotti who takes us to the station. At home the only ones who can drive are him (and he’s a terrible driver) and Alberto. I can’t—I haven’t got my licence yet, and I’ll really have to decide next spring . . . because . . . the problem is also this huge beast of an engine drinks like a fish!”

  She drew close to the carriage. Its appearance was just as shiny and efficient as the car’s.

  “D’you recognize it?”

  She opened one of the doors, got in and sat down. Then, patting the material of the seat next to her, she invited me to do likewise.

  I entered accordingly and sat on her left. No sooner had I made myself comfortable than, slowly turning on its hinges with the sheer force of inertia, the carriage door shut on its own with the dry, precise click of a trap.

  Now the beating of the rain on the coach-house roof became inaudible. It truly seemed as though we were in a small drawing room, a cramped and suffocating one.

  “How well you’ve kept it,” I said, unable to suppress the sudden emotion which registered in my voice as a slight tremor. “It still seems new. The only thing missing is a vase of flowers.”

  “Oh, as for flowers, Perotti sees that they’re in place when he takes Grandma out.”

  “So you still use it then!”

  “Not more than two or three times a year, and only for a tour of the garden.”

  “And the horse? Is it still the same one?”

  “Still the same old Star. He’s twenty-two. Didn’t you see him, the other day, at the back of the stall? By now he’s half-blind, but harnessed to the carriage, he still cuts a . . . lamentable figure.”

  She burst out laughing, shaking her head.

  “Perotti has a real mania about this carriage,” she continued bitterly. “And it’s mainly to please him (he hates and despises motor cars—you’ve no idea how much!) that every now and then we let him take Grandma out for a ride up and down the driveways. Every fortnight or so he’s in here with buckets of water, sponges, doeskins and rug-beaters—and that explains the miracle, that’s why the carriage, especially when seen at dusk, still manages more or less to hoodwink everyone.”

  “More or less?” I protested. “But it looks brand-new.”

  She snorted with boredom.

  “Do me a favor, and don’t talk drivel.”

  Spurred by some unpredictable impulse, she brusquely moved away, and huddled up in her corner. Her brow furrowed, her features sharpened with the same rancorous look with which, sometimes when playing tennis, and utterly focused on winning, she would stare straight ahead. Suddenly she seemed to have grown ten years older.

  We stayed for a few moments like this, in silence. Then, without changing position, her arms hugging her sun-tanned knees as though she was freezing (she was in short stockings, a light cotton T-shirt and a pullover tied by its sleeves round her neck), Micòl started to speak again.

  “Perotti would like to waste vast quantities of time and elbow grease on this ghastly old wreck!” she said. “No, listen to what I’m saying—here where the light is so dim you can make a great fuss about the wonder of it, but outside, by natural light, there’s nothing to be done about it, thousands of little defects glare at you, the paintwork stripped in many places, the spokes and hubs of the wheels are all eaten away, the material of this seat is worn away practically to a cobweb (now you can’t see it but I can assure you it’s so). And so I ask myself: what’s Perotti bursting his blood vessels for? Is it worth it? The poor creature wants to have Papa’s permission to repaint the whole thing, to restore and beaver away at it to his heart’s content. But Papa’s dithering about it as usual and can’t decide.”

  She fell silent; and moved very slightly.

  “Consider, in contrast, that canoe,” she went on, at the same time pointing out to me through the carriage-door window, which our breath had begun to mist over, a greyish, oblong, skeletal shape leaning against the wall opposite the grapefruit frame. “Consider the canoe, and admire how honestly, with what dignity and moral courage, it’s faced up to the full consequences of its utter uselessness, as it needed to. Even things, even they have to die, my friend. And so, if even they have to die, it’s just as well to let them go. Above all, there’s far more style in that, wouldn’t you say?”

  * Hebrew: “handmaid.”

  † Hebrew: “sage” or “teacher.”

  ‡ Hebrew: halti, “bigotry.”

  § Hebrew: hekhal, “Ark”; parokhet, “curtain before the Ark.”

  ¶ Nobil Huomo, a title of the Italian nobility.

  # In English in the original.

  ** Gruppo Universitario Fascista: Fascist university students’ organization.

  †† Hand-grenade. The “old heavies” are a Fascist squad.

  �
��‡ Milanese dialect: “What a big place Milan is!”

  §§ “It was already the hour when longing returns . . .” (Dante, Purgatorio, canto viii).

  ¶¶ See footnote on p. 41.

  ## “Who out of cowardice made the great refusal . . .” (Dante, Inferno, canto iii), commonly interpreted as a reference to Pope Celestine V.

  III

  • 1 •

  COUNTLESS times during the following winter, spring and summer, I kept thinking back to what had happened (or rather hadn’t happened) between Micòl and me, inside that carriage so beloved of old Perotti. If on that rainy afternoon, in which the luminous Indian summer of 1938 had suddenly come to an end, I had at the very least managed to say what I was feeling—I thought with bitterness—perhaps things between us would have gone differently from the way they did. To have spoken to her, to have kissed her: it was then—I couldn’t stop telling myself—then, when everything was still possible, that I should have done it! But I was forgetting to ask myself the crucial question: whether in that supreme, unique, irrevocable moment—a moment that, perhaps, had shaped both my life and hers—I was really ready to risk any act or word at all. Did I already know then, for example, that I was truly in love? The truth is: I didn’t know it. I didn’t know it then, and I wouldn’t know it for another two full weeks, when bad weather, having set in, had irremediably dispersed us and the occasi ons for which we’d gathered.