The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  I immediately straightened up, as usual unsure whether behind his slightly querulous kindness he was making fun of me.

  “Good evening,” I said, taking off my hat and stretching out my hand.

  “Good evening, my dear boy,” he replied. “But keep your hat on, please keep it on!”

  I felt his small plump hand rest inertly in my own and then as quickly withdraw. He was not wearing a hat but an old sporting beret tilted down over his spectacles, and a woolen scarf wrapped round his neck.

  He gave a diffident glance toward the bicycle.

  “You have locked it, haven’t you?”

  I said that I hadn’t. Then, upset, he insisted that I went back, and obliged him by locking it properly, since—he repeated—one never knows. A theft would be unlikely—he went on from the threshold as I once again attempted to hook the lock around the spokes of the back wheel. One couldn’t entirely trust to the garden wall. Along its outer perimeter, especially on the side of the Mura degli Angeli, there were at least a dozen points where a moderately adept boy would have no difficulty in climbing over. Then making a getaway, even weighed down by the bicycle over his shoulders, would be almost as straightforward an operation for such a boy.

  Finally I managed to click the lock shut. I raised my eyes but the threshold was once again deserted.

  The Professor was waiting for me inside the little entrance lobby, at the foot of the stairs. I went in, shut the door, and only then realized that he was looking at me with a troubled, regretful air.

  “I’m wondering,” he said, “if it wouldn’t have been better for you to actually bring the bicycle in . . . Yes, take my advice. The next time you come, bring the bicycle in with you. If you put it there beneath the stairs it won’t give the slightest trouble to anyone.”

  He turned round and began to walk up the stairs. More hunched than ever, still with that beret on his head and scarf round his neck, he ascended slowly, holding on to the banister. All the while talking, or rather muttering, as though his words were directed to himself rather than to me.

  It was Alberto who had told him I was coming round that day. For this reason, since Perotti was suspected of having a touch of fever (it was only a minor attack of bronchitis, but it needed looking after to avoid the spread of infection) and since Alberto—always so forgetful, distracted, with his head in the clouds—was really not to be relied on, he had had to assume the responsibility himself of “standing at the ready.” Doubtless, if it had been Micòl, he would have had no cause for worry, since Micòl, who knows how, always found time to look after everything, taking care not only of her own studies but also of the general running of the whole household, even of the kitchen “stoves.” She had a passion for that almost as strong as for novels and poetry—it was she who at the end of the week would do the accounts with Gina or Vittorina, she who would schecht¶ the poultry with her bare hands, and this despite the fact that she really loved the creatures, poor thing! But unfortunately Micòl wasn’t at home today (had Alberto warned me she wasn’t here?), having had to leave for Venice yesterday afternoon. His not being able to rely either on Alberto or on their “angel of the hearth” nor even, as if that wasn’t enough, on the indisposed Perotti, explained why this time he’d had to stand in as doorman.

  He also spoke of other things I don’t remember. I do recall, though, that in the end he came back to Micòl, but this time to complain about her “restlessness of late,” due of course to “many factors,” though . . . here he broke off suddenly. During all this time in which not only had we reached the top of the stairs, but had gone down two corridors, and crossed various rooms, Professor Ermanno had always preceded me, never letting me overtake except when he was turning off the lights in passing.

  Rapt with all I was hearing about Micòl (that detail about her, with her bare hands, being the one who’d cut the throats of the chickens in the kitchen strangely intrigued me), I looked around but almost without seeing. Besides, what we were passing through was not so unlike other houses which belonged to Ferrara’s high society, Jewish or not, laden like them with the usual furnishings, monumental wardrobes, heavy seventeenth-century chests of drawers with feet carved in the shape of lions’ paws, refectory-type tables, old Tuscan leather chairs with bronze studs, Frau armchairs, intricate glass and ironwork chandeliers hanging from the center of coffered ceilings, thick carpets the color of tobacco, carrot and ox-blood stretched out everywhere over darkly lustrous parquet. Here, perhaps, there were a greater number of nineteenth-century paintings, landscapes and portraits, and of books, most of them rebound, in rows behind the glass doors of huge, dark mahogany bookcases. The mammoth radiators released heat on a scale which at home my father would have declared plain crazy (I could just hear him saying it!): a heat redolent of a luxury hotel rather than a private home, and of such intensity that, almost immediately breaking out in a sweat, I’d had to take off my overcoat.

  With him in front and me in tow, we crossed at least a dozen rooms of differing size, some vast as real halls, some small, even tiny, and linked to each other by corridors which were not always straight nor on the same level. At last, having reached halfway down one such corridor, Professor Ermanno came to a halt in front of a door.

  “Here we are at last,” he said.

  He flicked his thumb toward the door and winked.

  He apologized for not being able to come in himself, as—he explained—he had to go over some accounts of their holdings in the country. He promised to have “one of the girls bring up something hot,” and then, having been assured that I’d come again—he had put aside for me the copies of his little studies on Venetian history, I wasn’t to forget!—he shook me by the hand, and speedily disappeared at the end of the corridor.

  I went in.

  “Ah! You’re here!” Alberto greeted me.

  He was slumped in an armchair. He levered himself up with both hands on the armrests, got to his feet, put down the book he had been reading, leaving it open with its spine up on a little low table beside him, and came toward me.

  He was wearing a pair of vicuña grey trousers, one of his fine pullovers the color of dry leaves, brown English lace-ups (they were real Dawsons—he would later inform me—which he’d found in a little Milanese shop near San Babila), a flannel shirt, without a tie, open at the collar, and was carrying a pipe between his teeth. He shook my hand without too much warmth, as he stared at a point behind my back. What was attracting his attention? I had no idea.

  “Excuse me,” he murmured.

  He let go of me, bending his long back sideways, and as he brushed past I realized that I’d left the double door half open. Alberto was already there, however, to see to it personally. He grasped the handle of the outer door, but before drawing it toward him he stuck his head out into the corridor to look around.

  “And Malnate,” I asked. “Isn’t he here yet?”

  “No, not yet,” he replied as he came back.

  He took my hat, scarf and coat from me, and disappeared into the small adjoining room. Through the communicating door I was thus able to see something of it: a part of the bed with a woolen coverlet in sporty red and blue squares, a pouffe at the foot of the bed, and, hanging on the wall beside the little doorway to the bathroom, this also half open, there was a small male nude by De Pisis in a simple frame of light-colored wood.

  “Do sit down,” Alberto said meanwhile. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  He did indeed return immediately, and now, seated in front of me, in the armchair I’d seen him pull himself out of with the faintest show of fatigue, perhaps of boredom, he considered me with that strange expression of detached, objective sympathy which was a sign in him, I knew, of the liveliest interest in others of which he was capable. He was smiling at me, revealing the large incisors he’d inherited from his mother’s family: too large and strong for his pale, long face, and for the gums they were set in, as bloodless as the face.

  “Would you like to listen to a bit o
f music?” he proposed, turning on a radiogram placed in a corner of the studio at the side of the entrance. “It’s a Philips, really the best.”

  He made as though to get up again from the armchair, but then abandoned the attempt.

  “No, wait,” he said, “perhaps later.”

  I looked around.

  “What records have you got?”

  “Oh, a bit of everything: Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. I also have at my disposal a good deal of jazz, but don’t be put off: Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, Charlie Kunz . . . ”

  He went on listing names and titles, cool and courteous as ever but without much interest, no more or less than if he’d been offering me a selection of dishes which he himself had made sure of tasting beforehand. He only became more animated, fractionally more, in demonstrating to me the virtues of his Philips. It was—he told me—a rather exceptional player, thanks to certain particular “technical improvements” he’d worked out himself and which a skilful Milanese technician had put into effect. These modifications principally concerned the quality of the sound, which now didn’t merely come through a single loudspeaker, but from four separate sources of sound. There was, in fact, one speaker which only picked up bass notes, a second for the mid-range sounds, a third for the treble, and a fourth for the very high. So that from the chosen speaker, let’s say, the highest notes, even whistles—here he sniggered—would “come through” to perfection. And don’t, for heaven’s sake, think for a moment that the speakers can be placed close up to one another! In the radiogram unit there are only two of them: the speaker for the medium-range sounds, and the one for the treble notes. The one for the very highest range he’d had the idea of hiding there at the end of the room, near the window, while the fourth one, for the bass, he’d fitted in under the sofa on which I was sitting. All this with the design of producing a certain stereophonic effect.

  Dirce entered at that moment, in a blue canvas blouse and white apron, tight at the waist, dragging behind her the tea trolley.

  I saw an expression of slight quarrelsomeness cross Alberto’s face. The girl must also have noticed it.

  “It was the Professor who ordered that I bring it immediately,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter. We might as well have a cup ourselves.”

  Blonde and curly-haired, with the flushed cheeks of the Veneto’s Alpine foothills, Perotti’s daughter, silently and with lowered eyes, prepared the tea cups, placed them on the small table and finally withdrew. A good scent of soap and talcum powder remained in the room. Even the tea, it seemed to me, was flavored with it.

  As I drank, I kept looking round me. I admired the room’s furnishings, all so rational, functional, modern, in complete contrast with the rest of the house, and yet, all the same, I couldn’t quite work out why I was afflicted by an ever-increasing sense of unease, of oppressiveness.

  “D’you like the way I’ve arranged the studio?” asked Alberto.

  He seemed suddenly anxious to have my approval: which, naturally, I didn’t begrudge, praising the simplicity of the furniture—having got to my feet, I went to examine more closely a large draftsman’s table set alongside and near the window, sporting a finely turned and jointed metal lamp—and especially the side-lighting which—I said—I not only found very relaxing but also excellent for working by.

  He let me run on and seemed pleased.

  “Did you design the furniture yourself?”

  “Not exactly. I copied a bit from Domus and Casabella, and a bit from Studio, you know, that English magazine . . . and a carpenter from Via Coperta made them for me.”

  Hearing me approve of the furniture—he added—couldn’t fail to gratify him. For a place to work or just hang out in, what was the point of surrounding oneself with ugly stuff or even antique junk? As for Giampi Malnate (he colored very faintly as he named him), he’d insinuated that, furnished in this manner, it resembled a garçonnière more than a studio, besides arguing, like the good Communist he was, that things can at the most only provide some palliativeor surrogate, himself being opposed in principle to any kind ofsurrogate or palliative, and even to technical expertise, whenever it assumed that a drawer which closes perfectly, just to give an example, might offer a resolution to all the individual’s problems, including those of morality and politics. He, however—touching his chest with a finger—had a different opinion. While respecting Malnate’s views (he was a Communist—absolutely, didn’t I know that?), he found life already confused and tedious enough without the household goods and furniture, the silent, faithful companions of our domestic life, having to be so as well.

  It was the first and last time that I would ever see him become heated, and take sides with one set of ideas rather than another. We drank a second cup of tea, but by then the conversation had languished, to such an extent it was necessary to have recourse to some music.

  We listened to a couple of records. Dirce returned, carrying a tray of pastries. At length, toward seven o’clock, a telephone on a desk next to the draftsman’s table began to ring.

  “D’you want to bet it’s Giampi?” Alberto murmured, rushing toward it.

  Before lifting the receiver he hesitated for a second: like a gambler who, having been dealt his cards, puts off the moment of discovering his luck.

  But it really was Malnate, as I quickly gathered.

  “So what are you doing? You’re not coming then?” Alberto said with disappointment, with an almost puerile whine in his voice.

  The other spoke rather at length (stuck between Alberto’s shoulder and neck, the receiver vibrated with the force of his calm Lombard voice). At the end I heard a “Bye” and the conversation was over.

  “He’s not coming,” Alberto commented.

  He slowly returned to the armchair. He let himself drop into it, stretched himself, and yawned.

  “It seems he’s been kept in at the factory,” he added, “and will be there for another three or four hours. He says he’s sorry. And asked me to send you his regards.”

  • 4 •

  RATHER THAN the generic “See you soon” I exchanged with Alberto, while taking my leave of him, it was a letter from Micòl, arriving a few days later, which convinced me to return.

  This letter was witty, neither too short nor too long, written on the four sides of two sheets of blue paper which her impetuous fluent handwriting had rapidly filled, without hesitations or corrections. Micòl begged me to forgive her: she had left unexpectedly. She hadn’t even said goodbye to me, and this had not been very stylish of her, she was only too willing to admit. She had tried to phone me, however—she added—before she’d left, and in the eventuality that I couldn’t be contacted, she’d asked Alberto to track me down. Since this had happened, had Alberto kept his promise of finding me, “at the cost of his life”? Famous as he was for his phlegmatism, he always ended up letting all of his contacts drop, and yet he had such a real need of them, poor thing! The letter went on for another two-and-a-half pages, explaining about her thesis which was by then “sailing on toward the finishing-line,” referring to Venice—which in winter “simply made one want to weep”—and coming to an unexpected conclusion with a verse translation of an Emily Dickinson poem.

  This:

  Morii per la Bellezza; e da poco ero

  discesa nell’avello,

  che, caduto pel Vero, uno fu messo

  nell’attiguo sacello.

  « Perché sei morta? », mi chiese sommesso.

  Dissi: « Morii pel Bello. »

  « Io per la Verità: dunque è lo stesso

  – disse –, son tuo fratello. »

  Da tomba a tomba, come due congiunti

  incontratisi a notte,

  parlavamo cosò; finché raggiunti

  l’erba ebbe nomi e bocche. #

  It was followed by a postscript which said, word for word: “Alas, poor Emily. Such are the kind of consolations one’s forced to find in abject spinsterhood!”<
br />
  I liked the translation, but was struck most of all by the postscript. Who was it referring to? To “poor Emily” or was it, rather, to a Micòl in self-pitying, depressive mode?

  Replying, I took care, once again, to hide behind a thick smokescreen. After having referred to my first visit to her house, and kept silent on how disappointing it had been for me, and after promising that I should very soon be returning there, I prudently confined myself to literature. Dickinson’s poem was wonderful—I wrote—but her translation was also excellent, particularly in the way it showed a somewhat dated taste, a bit “Carduccian.” Most of all I appreciated her faithfulness. With dictionary in hand, I had compared her version with the original text in English, finding nothing questionable except, perhaps, one detail, which was where she had translated “moss” which actually meant muschio, muffa, borraccina with erba, “grass.” I continued by saying that all the same, even in its present state, her translation worked very well, and in such things a beautiful inaccuracy was always better than a ploddingly correct ugliness. The fact I’d pointed out was, however, easily remedied. All that was needed was a small change in the final stanza, such as:

  Da tomba a tomba, come due congiunti

  incontratisi a notte,

  parlavamo; finché il muschio raggiunti

  ebbe i nomi, le bocche.

  Micòl replied two days later with a telegram in which she thanked me “truly, with heartfelt gratitude!” for my literary advice, and then, the next day, with a letter containing two new typed versions of the translation. In turn, I sent a letter of some ten pages which quarrelled, word by word, with her postcard. All considered, by letter we were far more clumsy and lifeless than on the telephone, so much so that in a short while we stopped corresponding. In the meantime, however, I had taken up visiting Alberto’s studio, regularly, more or less every day.