by André Aciman
I remember how the insistent rain, falling uninterruptedly for days and days, as a prelude to winter, the rigid, gloomy winter of the Po valley, had made any further visits to the garden out of the question. And yet, despite the change of season, everything proceeded in such a way as to deceive me that nothing had substantially changed.
At half past two on the day after our last visit to the Finzi-Continis’—more or less the time when, one after the other, we would have emerged from the tunnel of little climbing roses, shouting out “Hi!” or “Hello!” or “Greetings!”—the telephone at my house rang and put me in contact, as though with the real thing, with the voice of Micòl. That same evening it was I who telephoned her, and the next afternoon it was again she who took the initiative. We might have kept our conversations going just as we had on those latter occasions, grateful now as we were before that Bruno Lattes, Adriana Trentini, Giampiero Malnate and all the others had left us alone and shown no sign of remembering us. Besides, when had we, Micòl and I, ever given a thought to them during our long excursions in the park—so long that often when we returned we found no trace of them, either on the court or in the Hütte?
Pursued by the worried looks of my parents, I closed myself up in the cupboard that housed the telephone. I dialled the number. It was almost always she who answered—with such alacrity that I suspected she must be forever carrying the phone around with her.
“Where are you speaking from?” I once tried to ask her.
She started to laugh.
“Well . . . from home, I guess.”
“Thanks for that information. I just wanted to know how come you always manage to answer in a flash, so quickly, I mean. Do you have the phone on your desk like a businessman? Or from morning till night do you pace around the apparatus like the caged tiger in Machatý’s Nocturne?”
I seemed to detect a slight hesitation from the other end of the line. If she got to the phone before the others did, she then replied, that was, apart from the famous speed of her reflexes, because of her gift of intuition—an intuition which, every time the thought of phoning her passed through my mind, ensured that she was in the vicinity of the telephone. She then changed the subject. How was my thesis on Panzacchi going? And Bologna—when would I be resuming my usual journeys back and forth, if only for a change of scene?
Sometimes, however, someone else answered—either Alberto, or Professor Ermanno, or one of the two maids and even, on one occasion, Signora Regina, who displayed a surprising acuity of hearing when it came to the telephone. In such cases, of course, I was forced to announce my name and to state that it was “Signorina” Micòl I’d like to speak to. After a few days, though—at first this would embarrass me even more, but I gradually got used to it—it was enough for me to drop my “Hello” into the receiver for the person on the other end hurriedly to pass me on to the one I was seeking. Even Alberto, when it was he who picked up the phone, did not behave any differently. Micòl was always there, ready to snatch the receiver from whoever’s hand it was in, as though they were always gathered together in a single room, a “living room,” drawing room or library, each of them sunk into a vast leather armchair within a few steps of the telephone. I really began to suspect that. To inform Micòl, who, at the trilling of the phone (I could almost see her) would suddenly look up, they perhaps confined themselves to offering her the receiver from a distance, Alberto, when it was he, no doubt doing so with a wink poised between the affectionate and the sardonic.
One morning I decided to ask her to verify my guesswork, and she heard me out in silence.
“Isn’t it true?” I pressed her.
Apparently it wasn’t. Since I was so keen to know the truth—she said—here it was, then. Each of them had a telephone line in their own room (after she’d got one for herself, the rest of the family had also ended up having them installed). They were the most useful mechanisms, she wholeheartedly recommended them: they let you phone out at whatever time of the day or night without disturbing anyone or being disturbed, and they were especially convenient at night-time. Saved you even putting a foot out of bed. What a weird idea!—she added, laughing—whatever made me think that they’d all be gathered together as though in a hotel lobby? Why on earth would they be doing that? It was strange though that when it wasn’t she who answered directly, I never heard the click of the phone being lifted.
“No,” she categorically reiterated. “To safeguard personal liberty, there’s nothing like a private phone line. Honestly—you should get one yourself, in your own room. Just think how we’d be able to talk, especially at night!”
“And so you’re phoning me now from your bedroom?”
“I certainly am. And from my bed as well.”
It was eleven in the morning.
“You’re not exactly an early bird.”
“Oh, not you as well!” she complained. “It’s one thing for my father, who’s worn down with worries and seventy years old, to keep getting up at six-thirty to set us a good example, as he puts it, and to stop us loafing around in feather beds, but it’s honestly a bit much when our best friends start preaching at us. Do you know what time yours truly got up, my dear boy? At seven. And you dare to wonder that I’m back in bed again at eleven! Besides, it’s not as though I was sleeping—I’ve been reading, scribbling some notes for my thesis, and looking out of the window. I always do a whole lot of things when I’m in bed. The warmth of the blankets undoubtedly spurs me into activity.”
“Describe your room for me.”
She clicked her tongue three times as a sign of refusal.
“No way. That’s verboten. Privat. Though, if you insist, I could tell you what I can see from the window.”
She could see through the glass, in the foreground, the bearded tips of her Washingtoniae graciles which the wind and the rain were beating at so “vilely.” Who knows if the solicitude of Titta and Bepi, who had already begun to wrap the usual straw coats around their trunks as they did every winter, would be enough to protect them in the succeeding months from a frostbitten death which threatened every year, when the grim weather returned, and which till then they’d always luckily avoided. Then, farther off, partly hidden by wisps of wandering mist, she could see the four towers of the Estense Castle which the heavy rainshowers had turned black as clinker. And behind the towers, with a bruised look that would make you shudder, and that too hidden every now and then by the mist, the distant marble stonework of the Duomo’s facade and bell-tower . . . Oh, that mist! She couldn’t bear it when it was like this—it made her think of dirty rags. But sooner or later the rain would cease, and then the mist, in the morning, pierced by weak rays of sunshine, would be turned into something precious, something delicately opalescent, which in its changing reflections of tone was exactly like those làttimi which her room was full of. Winter was a pain, it’s true, not least because it put an end to tennis, but it had its compensations. “Since every situation, however sad and annoying it is,” she concluded, “in the end offers certain compensations, and often significant ones.”
“Làttimi?” I asked. “What are they? Something to eat?”
“No. Not at all,” she protested petulantly, appalled as usual by my ignorance. “They’re things made with milky glass. Normal glasses, champagne glasses, ampoules, dainty vases, little boxes, stuff you might find among the junk in antique dealers’ shops. In Venice they call them làttimi, and elsewhere opalines or even flûtes. You’ve no idea how much I adore these things. There’s nothing at all I don’t know about the subject. Try testing me and see.”
It was in Venice, she went on, perhaps prompted by the local mists, so different from our big gloomy Paduan fogs, mists which are infinitely more lovely and luminous and which only one painter in the world had managed to do justice to—and that wasn’t late Monet but “our” De Pisis—it was in Venice that she’d first got so interested in làttimi. She had spent hours going round antique shops. There were some, especially in the San Samuele di
strict, around Campo Santo Stefano, or in the Ghetto, at the far end toward the station, that practically sold nothing but. Her uncles Giulio and Federico lived in the Calle del Cristo, near San Moisè. Late afternoons, not knowing what else to do, and naturally with the housekeeper Signorina Blumenfeld glued to her side—a prim jodé* sixty-year-old from Frankfurt-am-Main, who’d been in Italy for more than thirty years, a real bore!—she would go out into Calle XXII Marzo in search of làttimi. From San Moisè, Campo Santo Stefano is a short walk. Unlike San Geremia, which is in the Ghetto—if you go by San Bartolomòo and the Lista di Spagna it takes at least half an hour to get there, and yet it’s very close indeed. You just have to take a traghetto along the Grand Canal as far as Palazzo Grassi and then leap off at the Frari . . . But returning to the làttimi, what a thrill, the thrill of a dowser, she got every time she managed to unearth a new and especially rare one! Did I want to know how many pieces she’d collected? Almost two hundred.
I carefully avoided telling her that what she was saying hardly seemed consistent with her declared aversion to any, even the briefest, attempt to keep things, objects, from the inevitable death which—even for them—lay in wait, and to the mania for preserving them that Perotti in particular had. I wanted her to go on describing her room, and to forget her earlier prescriptions of “verboten” and “privat.”
I succeeded. She kept on talking about her làttimi (she had arranged them neatly on three high, dark mahogany shelves which stretched almost the whole length of the wall which faced the one alongside which her bed had been placed) and as she did so, her room, I’m not sure how conscious she was of this, was gradually taking shape, and all its details were being delineated.
Thus: of windows, there were two. Both of them faced south, and were so high off the floor that to look out from them, with the park stretching out beneath and the roofs which beyond the park’s edge extended out of sight, it seemed as though one were looking out from the deck of a transatlantic liner. Between the two windows was a fourth shelf—the shelf for English and French books. Against the left-hand window was an office-type desk, flanked by a small table for the portable typewriter on one side, and on the other by a fifth bookshelf, this one for Italian literature, classic and modern, and for translations: mainly from Russian—Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. On the floor, a large Persian carpet, and at the center of the room, which was long but rather narrow, three armchairs and a chaise longue to stretch out on while reading. Two doors: one for the entrance, at the end, by the left-hand window, which directly communicated with the staircase and lift, and another a few inches from the opposite corner of the room which led to the bathroom. At night she slept without ever fully closing the shutters, keeping a little lamp at the bedside table always on, and the trolley with a thermos of Skiwasser (as well, of course, as the telephone!) so they could be reached merely by stretching out an arm. If she woke up in the night, all she needed to do was take a sip of Skiwasser (it was so comfy always having it ready nice and hot—why didn’t I too get myself one, a thermos?). After which, she would slump back down, and let her eyes rove over those misty, luminescent, treasured làttimi. That way, sleep would creep up on her as stealthily as a Venetian “high tide,” and quickly submerge and “prostrate” her.
But these were not our only topics of conversation.
As though she also wanted to deceive me into thinking that nothing had changed, that everything between us was the same as “before” when, that is, we had been able to see each other every afternoon, Micòl never missed a chance to remind me of that series of “incredible,” wonderful days we had spent together.
We’d always spoken of a whole range of things, back then, while walking around in the park: of trees, plants, our childhoods, our relatives. In the meantime, Bruno Lattes, Adriana Trentini, the Malnate, Carletto Sani, Tonino Collevatti and, with them, those who visited later, hardly merited more than the odd reference, the whole group of them designated in the cursory and rather disdainful phrase “those others.”
Now, however, on the telephone, our talks continually harked back to them, and especially to Bruno Lattes and Adriana Trentini, who, according to Micòl, had a “thing” going on. Was I serious?—she kept saying to me. How could I not have noticed that they were going out together? It was so blatant! His eyes never left her for a moment, and she too, though she treated him like a slave, while she played the flirt a bit with everyone, with me, with that bear of a Malnate, and even with Alberto, she too was obviously smitten. Dear Bruno! With his temperament (let’s be honest, a bit impressionable, or how else explain the way he reveres two well-meaning blockheads of the calibre of little Sani and that youth Collevatti!), with his temperament these last months can hardly have been easy on him, given the situation. No question about it, Adriana was up for it (one evening, in the Hütte, she had happened to see them half stretched out on the sofa kissing like there was no tomorrow) though whether she was the type of person to be able to keep something so demanding alive, in defiance of the Racial Laws, and of both his and her relatives, that was another question. Bruno truly can’t have been having an easy time of it, this winter. And it’s not as though Adriana was a bad catch, far from it! Almost as tall as Bruno, blond, with that lovely skin like Carole Lombard’s—at another time she might have been exactly what Bruno dreamed of, given how much he clearly went for the “decidedly Aryan” type. That she was also a bit of an empty-headed flirt, and unconsciously cruel, couldn’t be denied. Didn’t I recall the look she’d given poor Bruno that time when, as a pair, they lost the famous return match against the duo Désirée Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo? It was mainly her, and not Bruno at all, who lost the match for them, with that endless series of double-faults she contrived—at least three every time she was serving! And yet, completely unaware, for the whole match she did nothing but berate him with foul mutterings as if he, the poor creature, wasn’t done in and depressed enough on his own account. Seriously, it would have been a total joke if it wasn’t for the fact that, all considered, the whole event had ended up as rather a bitter one! But so it goes. Without doing it deliberately, moralists like Bruno always fall for little Adriana-types, and from this springs a whole flood of jealous scenes, furtive tailings, unpleasant surprises, tearful episodes, sworn denials, even comings-to-blows, and infidelities, I’m telling you, endless infidelities. No, in the end, Bruno ought to have lit a candle in gratitude to the Racial Laws. He would have to face up to a difficult winter, it was true. But the Racial Laws, not always without some consolations then, would have saved him from committing the most blatant stupidity—of getting engaged.
“Don’t you agree?” she once added. “And also because he, like yourself, has literary ambitions, he’s someone who’s drawn to writing. I seem to remember having seen, two or three years ago, some of his verses published in the literary pages of the Padano all under the title “Poems of an Avant-gardist.”
“Alas!” I sighed. “But what are you trying to say? I don’t understand.”
She silently laughed—I could clearly hear her.
“Yes indeed, at a final reckoning,” she went on, “a bit of gall and wormwood won’t do him much harm. ‘Non mi lasciare ancora, sofferenza† as Ungaretti says. He wants to write? Let him take what’s coming to him, and then let’s see. Besides, you just have to look at him to tell—it’s as clear as day that pain is what he fervently desires.”
“You’re disgustingly cynical. You and Adriana make quite a pair.”
“You’re wrong about that. And actually you’ve offended me. Compared to me, Adriana’s blameless as an angel. Capricious perhaps, but unconscious, innocent like ‘tutte/le femmine ditutti / i sereni animali / che avvicinano a Dio.’‡ Whereas Micòl’s good, I’ve told you already and I’ll tell you again, and she knows what she does—remember that well.”
Although far less often, she did also mention Giampiero Malnate, toward whom she’d always behaved curiously, basically in a critical and sarcas
tic way, as though she were jealous of the friendship that bound him and Alberto (a bit exclusive, to tell the truth), but at the same time was reluctant to admit it, and for that reason was driven to “smash the idol.”
In her view, even physically Malnate wasn’t that impressive. Too big, too bulky, too much like a “father” to be taken seriously in this respect. He was one of those excessively hairy men who, however many times a day they shave, still always look dirty, a bit unwashed—and this, let’s be honest, wouldn’t do. Perhaps, as far as one could see through the thick lenses of his glasses, his camouflage (it seemed that they made him sweat, and that made you want to take them off him), his eyes weren’t really that bad: grey, “steely,” the eyes of a strong, silent type. But too serious and severe. Too constitutionally marriageable. Belying their effect of scornful misogyny, they were full of the threat of feelings so eternal that they’d scare off any girl, even the quietest and meekest.
He was always so sulky, that’s it; and not nearly as original as he seemed to think himself. Did I want to bet that, with the right line of questioning, he’d not come out and claim that he felt ill at ease in city clothes, and much more at home anywhere in the windjammer, plus-fours and ski-boots that he’d be kitted out in for his unmissable weekends on Mottarone or Monte Rosa? His trusty pipe, when seen in this light, was fairly revealing—it stood for a whole system of sub-Alpine, masculine austerity, like a flag.
He was great friends with Alberto, but as for Alberto, with his temperament passive as a punchbag, he always befriends everyone and no one. They’d lived whole years together at Milan, and that certainly had to be given weight. Didn’t I also find a bit too much, all the same, their endless confabulations? Pst! Pst! Woof! Woof! No sooner would they meet each other than they were at it again, drawing apart from everyone else and muttering away. And heaven knows what about! Girls? She somehow doubted it. Knowing Alberto, who had always been rather reticent—not to say mysterious—about such matters, honestly, she wouldn’t place the smallest bet on it.