by André Aciman
One morning he stayed to talk longer than usual. In a roundabout manner, he began to speak once again of Carducci’s letters and his own “little works” on the Venetian topic: all the stuff—he said, nodding toward his study behind me—which he kept “back there.” He smiled mysteriously as he mentioned this, his face assuming a sly, inviting expression. It was obvious he wanted to lead me “back there,” and at the same time wanted it to be me who proposed I should be taken there.
I made haste to oblige him.
So we went to the study, which was a room hardly less grand than the billiards room, but reduced, rendered almost shrunken, by an incredible accumulation of disparate things.
To start with, there was an abundance of books. Those on literary subjects mixed up with the scientific (mathematics, physics, economics, agriculture, medicine, astronomy and so on); books on local history, Ferrarese or Venetian, with those on “ancient Jewish history”—the volumes chaotically crowded the usual glass-fronted bookcases, and took up a good part of the big walnut table (behind which, if he were seated, Professor Ermanno would most likely show as little more than the top of his beret); they were heaped up in perilously unsteady piles on the chairs, stacked into towers even on the floor, and scattered around almost everywhere. An enormous map of the world, then a lectern, a microscope, half a dozen barometers, a steel safe painted dark red, a small white bed like you see in doctors’ surgeries, several hourglasses of different sizes, a brass kettledrum, a little German upright piano topped by two metronomes shut in their pyramidical cases, and beyond, many other objects of uncertain use which I don’t now recall, lent the surroundings the look of a Faustian laboratory, which Professor Ermanno himself was the first to make fun of and to excuse himself for as if it represented a personal, private weakness of his: almost as if it was all that remained of his childish fads. However, I was forgetting to mention the fact that as far as pictures went, in contrast to all the other rooms of the house, which were generally overladen with them, here there were none to be seen except one: a huge life-size portrait by Lenbach, weighing on the wall behind the table like an altarpiece. The magnificent blonde lady bodied forth in this, standing upright, her shoulders bared, a fan in her gloved hand and with the silken train of her white gown brought to the fore to emphasize her length of leg and fullness of form, was obviously no other than the Baroness Josette Artom di Susegana. What a marmoreal forehead, what eyes, what a scornful lip, what a bust! She truly looked like a queen. Among that host of objects in the study, his mother’s portrait was the only thing Professor Ermanno did not joke about—not that morning, not ever.
That very morning, though, I was at last presented with the two Venetian tracts. In one of them—the Professor explained to me—all the inscriptions of the Jewish cemetery at the Lido were assembled and translated. The second, on the other hand, was on a Jewish woman poet who had lived in Venice in the first half of the seventeenth century, and as renowned to her contemporaries as she was now, “sadly,” forgotten. She was called Sara Enriquez (or Enriques) Avigdòr. For some decades, at her house in the Old Ghetto, she had held an important literary salon, assiduously frequented not only by the extremely gifted Ferrarese-Venetian rabbi Leone da Modena but also by many first-rate literary figures of the age, foreign as well as Italian. She had composed a considerable number of the “finest” sonnets, which still now awaited a scholar capable of reassessing and reasserting their beauty. She had undertaken a brilliant correspondence with the famous Ansaldo Cebà, a gentleman from Genoa, who had written an epic poem on Queen Esther, and had become fixated on the idea of converting her to Catholicism, but then, in the end, seeing how futile all his insistence had been, had had to renounce this plan. A great woman, all considered: the honor and boast of Italian Jewry at the height of the Counter-Reformation, and in some way a part of the “family”—Professor Ermanno had added as he was writing a couple of lines as a book dedication for me—since it seemed certain that his wife, on her mother’s side, was one of her descendants.
He got up, walked around the table, took me by the arm and led me into the window bay.
There was, however, something—he continued, lowering his voice as though he feared someone might overhear us—which he felt obliged to warn me about. If, in the future, I should ever happen to concern myself with this Sara Enriquez, or Enriques, Avigdòr (and the subject was such as to merit a far more deep and detailed study than he in his youth had been able to give to it), at a certain point, I would inevitably have to confront some contrary opinions . . . disagreements . . . in fact some writings by third-rate literary figures, most of them the poetess’s contemporaries (libellous things that were glaringly envious and anti-Semitic), which insinuated that not all the sonnets signed by her in circulation, and not even all the letters written by her to Cebà were, let’s say, written by her own hand. Well, he, if his memory served him well, had obviously been unable to ignore the existence of such slanders and had, in fact, as I’d see, properly documented them. In any case . . .
He broke off to look me in the eyes, uncertain of my reactions.
In any case—he continued—even if I should think “sometime in the future” . . . umm . . . if I should ever attempt a reevaluation . . . a revision . . . he advised me even then not to give too much credit to these malicious rumors. They might well be intriguing, but in the end they were misplaced. What, finally, was it that made an excellent historian? He must set himself the ideal of arriving at the truth, without in the process losing a sense of what’s right and appropriate. Didn’t I think so?
I nodded my head to show I agreed, and he, relieved, patted me on the back with the palm of his hand.
This done, he moved away, hunched up, across the study and bent to tinker with the safe, which he opened. He then drew from it a small casket covered in blue velvet.
He turned round, once more all smiles, toward the window, and before opening up the small casket, he said that he could see that I’d already guessed its contents—within, indeed, was kept the famous Carducci correspondence. It amounted to fifteen letters: and not all of them—he added—would I perhaps judge to be of the most pressing interest, as at least five of the fifteen were concerned with a special “blood sausage from hereabouts” of which the poet, having received it as a gift, had been “so greatly” appreciative. All the same, I would without doubt be struck by one of them. It was a letter of autumn 1875, written therefore at the time when the crisis of the Historic Right was looming on the horizon. That autumn Carducci’s political stance seemed to be that as a declared democrat, Republican and revolutionary, he was unable to join the ranks of Agostino Depretis’s left. On the other hand, “l’irto vinattier di Stradella”** and the “crowd” of his friends seemed to him common folk, “little men.” People who would never be capable of restoring Italy to its calling, of making Italy a Great Nation, worthy of its ancient Forefathers . . .
We stayed there talking until dinnertime. The result, at the end of all this, was that from that morning on the communicating door between the billiards room and the next-door study, till then always shut, now often remained open. Most of the time, the two of us stayed in our respective rooms. Yet we saw each other a lot more than before, Professor Ermanno coming to seek me out, and I making my way to him. Through the door, when it was open, we even exchanged the odd word: “What time is it?” “How’s the work going?” and such things. Some years later, during the spring of 1943, in jail, the phrases that I would exchange with an unknown neighboring cellmate, shouting up toward the air-hole of the “wolf’s mouth,” would be of this kind: spoken in just this way, above all from the need to hear your own voice, to sense that you are alive.
• 7 •
AT HOME, that year, Passover was celebrated with a single dinner.
It was my father who wanted it this way. Also, given Ernesto’s absence—he’d said—we’d best forget having a Passover like those of previous years. And then, apart from this, how could we have done othe
rwise? They, my Finzi-Continis, had once more managed things perfectly. With the excuse of the garden they had succeeded in keeping all their servants, from the first to the last, letting them pass as farm-workers adept in the cultivation of vegetable-garden produce. And ourselves? From the time we had been forced to give notice to Elisa and Mariuccia, and to assume in their place that dried fish of an old Cohen, in practice we had no one to call on. In such circumstances, even our mother would be unable to work a miracle.
“Isn’t it true, my angel?”
My angel didn’t nurse any warmer feelings for the sixty-year-old Signorina Ricca Cohen than my father did. Instead of being delighted, as usual, to hear one of us speak ill of the poor old woman, Mamma had consented with heartfelt gratitude to the idea of a low-key Passover. All right then—she had agreed: just one dinner, and that’s all, a meal for the first evening. So what do we need to make it? She and Fanny would take care of everything, almost unassisted, without “that one”—here she tilted her chin toward Cohen, shut in the kitchen—getting into one of her usual tempers. Plus, why not, so “that one” wouldn’t have to scramble to and fro with so many plates and pans, at the risk, among other things, weak in the legs as she was, of some disaster or other, why not arrange it in another way—rather than eat in the dining room, so far away from the kitchen, and this year, with the snow, chilly as Siberia, rather than the dining room why not lay the table here in the breakfast room . . .
It was not a happy meal. At the table’s center, the hamper which apart from the ritual “snacks” contained the tureen of haroset, the tufts of bitter herbs, the unleavened bread and the boiled egg reserved for me, the first-born, uselessly enthroned beneath the blue-and-white silk handkerchief which grandma Ester had embroidered with her own hands forty years ago. In spite of all the care taken, or rather because of it, the table had assumed a look closely resembling the one it wore those evenings of Yom Kippur, when it was set out only for Them, the family dead, whose mortal remains lay in the cemetery at the end of Via Montebello, and yet made their presence decidedly felt, here, in spirit or effigy. Here, that evening, in place of them, we, the living, sat to eat. But fewer of us compared to before, and no longer light-hearted, laughing, loud-voiced, but rather sad and wistful like the dead. I looked at my father and my mother, both of them much aged in those last months. I looked at Fanny, who was then already fifteen, but, as though some ancient fear had arrested her development, she seemed no more than twelve. I looked around, one by one, at uncles and aunts and cousins, a great number of whom, within a few years, would be swallowed up by German crematoria ovens, and never would they have dreamed of ending up like that, nor would I myself have dreamed it, but all the same, then, that evening, already, even though I saw them looking so insignificant, their pitiful faces topped with dowdy bourgeois hats or framed by bourgeois perms, even if I was aware how obtuse their minds were, how utterly unable to grasp the realities of that present moment or to read anything of the future, already they seemed to me swathed in the same aura of statue-like, mysterious fate that still, in memory, encircles them today. I looked at old Cohen, the few times she dared to peep out from behind the kitchen door: Ricca Cohen, the distinguished spinster in her sixties who had come from the old people’s home at Via Vittoria to serve in the house of well-off co-religionists, but who wanted nothing other than to return there, to the home, and, before the times got any worse, to die. Finally I looked at myself, reflected within the dark waters of the mirror opposite, and even I was already a little grey-haired, even I was caught up in the same cogs, but reluctantly, still unresigned. I wasn’t dead yet—I told myself—I was still bursting with life! And yet, if I was still alive, how come I was there with them, for what purpose? Why didn’t I immediately leave that grotesque and desperate gathering of ghosts, or at least stop up my ears so as not to hear any more talk of “discrimination,” of “patriotic awards of merit,” of “certificates of ancestry,” of “proportions of Jewish blood,” so as not to have to listen to the narrow-minded keening, the grey, monotonous, futile dirge that relatives and kin were meekly intoning all around me? The meal would drag on like that, chewing over the same familiar sayings for who knows how long, with my father frequently bringing forth, in his bitter, relishing style, the various “affronts” he’d had to submit to in the course of these past months, beginning with the time when in the Party Headquarters the Federal Secretary, Consul Bolognesi, with a saddened, shifty look, had announced to him that he had been forced to “cancel” him from the list of Party members, and ending up with the time when the president of the Merchants’ Club, with an equally sorrowing look, had called him over to tell him that he should consider himself “struck off.” Oh, he could tell us some stories! To keep us up till midnight, till one or two!
And then, what would follow? The final scene, the communal goodbyes. I could already see it. We would have gone down the dark stairs all together, like a besieged flock. Having reached the entrance hall, someone—perhaps me—would have gone on ahead to leave the street door ajar, and then, one final time, before separating, on everyone’s part, and mine included, there would be a renewal of the goodnights, the best wishes, the hand-shakings, the embraces and the kisses on both cheeks. But then, suddenly, from the street door left half open, there, against the blackness of the night, a gust of wind would sweep through the entrance hall. A hurricane wind that came from the night. It would crash down the hallway, cross, then pass beyond it, whistling through the gates that divided the hall from the garden, and meanwhile disperse with its force any of the guests who might have wanted to delay, with its savage howl would suddenly quell and hush any who might still have wished to linger and talk. Thin voices, faint cries, immediately overwhelmed. All of them blown away—light as leaves, as bits of paper, as hairs from a head of hair turned grey with age and terror . . . Oh, in the end, Ernesto had been lucky not to have gone to university in Italy. He had written from Grenoble to say that he was suffering from hunger, and that, with the little French he knew, he could hardly understand anything of the lessons in the Polytechnic. But lucky him to be suffering from hunger and being scared he wouldn’t pass his exams. I had stayed here, and for me who had stayed, and who’d once again chosen out of pride or sterility a solitude nourished by vague, nebulous, impotent hopes, for me there really was no hope at all.
But who can ever foretell the future?
Nearing eleven o’clock, as it happened, while my father, with the evident intent of dispelling the general low spirits, had begun singing the happy nonsense-verses of “Caprét ch’avea comperà il signor Padre”†† (his favorite song, his “battle-steed” as he would put it), it happened that at a certain point, by chance, lifting my eyes to the mirror opposite, I caught sight of the telephone cupboard’s door very slowly opening a little, behind my back. Through the hatch cautiously jutted the face of old Cohen. She was looking right at me, and it seemed almost as though she was begging for my help.
I got up and went over.
“What’s wrong?”
She nodded at the telephone receiver dangling on its wire, and disappeared through the doorway that gave onto the entrance hall.
Left alone, in utter darkness, before even lifting the receiver to my ear, I recognized the voice of Alberto.
“I can hear singing,” he was crying out in a strangely festive voice. “At what point in the proceedings are you?”
“At the ‘Caprét ch’avea comperà il signor Padre’ point.”
“That’s good. We’ve already finished. Why don’t you drop round?”
“Right now?” I exclaimed astonished.
“Why not? Here the conversation has begun to enter the doldrums and you, with your much acclaimed resources, would doubtless be able to lift it up again.”
He sniggered.
“And also . . . ” he added, “we’ve prepared a surprise for you.”
“A surprise? And what might that be?”
“Come and see.”
; “Such mysteriousness.”
My heart was beating furiously.
“Put your cards on the table.”
“Go on, don’t make me have to beg. I repeat: come and see.”
I immediately went to the entrance, took my overcoat, scarf and hat, stuck my head around the kitchen door, asking Cohen in a whisper to say, in case they asked where I was, that I’d had to go out for a moment, and two minutes later I was already on the street.
It was a magnificent moonlit night, frozen, clear as could be. There was no one, almost no one on the streets, and Corso Giovecca and Corso Ercole I d’Este, smooth, empty and of an almost salt-like whiteness, opened up in front of me like two huge ski-tracks. In the bright light, I swayed down the middle of the street, my ears numbed by the icy air. At supper I’d drunk a fair few glasses of wine, and not only could I not feel the cold, but I was actually sweating. My bike’s front tyre barely rustled over the hardened snow, and the dry snow-dust it raised filled me with a sense of reckless joy, as though I was skiing. I raced on, without fear of skidding. Meanwhile I thought of the surprise, which, according to Alberto, would be awaiting me at the Finzi-Continis’. Had Micòl perhaps returned? Odd if she had. Why wouldn’t she have come to the phone herself? And why, before supper, had no one seen her at the Temple? If she had been at the Temple, I would already have known of it. My father at the dinner table, making his usual survey of those present at the service—he’d done this especially for me: as an indirect reproach for my non-attendance—would certainly not have neglected to mention her. He had gone through the whole list, naming them one by one, of the Finzi-Continis and the Herreras, but not her. Was it possible she had come on her own at the last minute, on the direct, quarter-past-nine train?
In an even more intense brightness of moonlight and snow, I went on across the Barchetto del Duca. Halfway, a little before the bridge crosses the Panfilio canal, a gigantic shadow suddenly appeared before me. It was Jor. There was a moment’s delay before I recognized him, just as I was about to cry out. But no sooner had I done so than the fear I felt was transformed into an almost equally paralyzing sense of foreboding. So then it was true—I told myself—Micòl was back. Forewarned by the street bell, she must have got up from the table, gone downstairs and now, sending Jor out to meet me, was waiting for me at the threshold of the side door reserved exclusively for family and close friends. A few more pedalings, and there was Micòl herself, a small dark figure etched against an electric-light background of sheerest white, her back encircled by the protective breath of the central heating. Another moment or two and I would hear her voice, her “Hi.”