The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  “I’m telling you for the thousandth time you’re wrong,” Micòl said in a low tone, “but I know it’s pointless. I know you’ll want to return to the fray tomorrow with the same old story. What do you want me to say—that I’m plotting in secret, that I’m living a double life? If you really want that, I could certainly oblige you.”

  “No, Micòl,” I replied in an equally low but far more agitated tone. “I may be all kinds of things, but I’m not a masochist. If only you knew how normal, how terribly banal my hopes are—you’d laugh. If there’s one thing I want, it’s this—to hear you swear what you’ve said is true, and to believe you.”

  “Well, I swear it. Now do you believe me?”

  “No.”

  “So much the worse for you then!”

  “True, it’s all the worse for me. And yet if I could really believe you . . . ”

  “Then what would you do? Let’s hear.”

  “Oh, just the most normal, banal stuff—that’s the problem. This, for example.”

  I grasped her hands, and began to cover them with kisses and tears.

  For a while she let me. I hid my face in her knees, and the smell of her skin, smooth and soft, slightly salty, numbed me. I kissed her there, on the legs.

  “Now, that’s enough,” she said.

  She withdrew her hands from mine, and stood up.

  “Goodbye. I’m cold,” she went on, “and you should go home. Dinner will be ready by now, and I have to wash and dress first. Get up, come on, and stop acting like a baby.”

  “Goodbye,” she then shouted toward the Hütte. “I’m going now.”

  “Goodbye,” Malnate replied from inside, “and thanks.”

  “See you soon. Are you coming tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know about tomorrow. We’ll see.”

  Separated by the bicycle whose handlebars I was feverishly grasping, we made our way toward the magna domus, standing tall and dark in the summer dusk alive with bats and mosquitoes. We kept silent. A cart brimming with hay, drawn by a pair of yoked oxen, was going in the opposite direction to us. Seated on top of it was one of Perotti’s sons who, coming level with us, doffed his beret and wished us good evening. Even though I’d accused Micòl without believing it, I’d still have liked to shout at her—telling her to stop play-acting with me. I wanted to insult her, even to slap her. And if I had? What would I have gained from it?

  But I did something just as mistaken.

  “It’s pointless you denying it,” I said, “and anyway I know who the person is.”

  No sooner had these words escaped me than I regretted them.

  Now aggrieved and in earnest, she looked at me.

  “I see,” she said, “and now, according to your calculations, I’ll have to try to get you to spit out the name and surname you’ve hidden away, if you really have any name in mind at all. But I’m afraid that’s it. I don’t want to hear anything more. Only that, having arrived at this point, I’d be grateful if from now on you were a little less assiduous in your visits . . . I mean, if you were to come to our house less often. I’m telling you frankly: if I didn’t fear being overwhelmed by gossip in the family—how come . . . why ever . . . etc., I’d beg you not to come at all, ever again.”

  “Forgive me,” I murmured.

  “No. That I can’t do,” she replied, shaking her head. “If I did, in a few days you’d only start again.”

  She added that for a long time up till then my way of behaving had been undignified—both for her and for myself. She had told me and repeated it a thousand times that it was useless, that I shouldn’t attempt to shift our relationship onto any other plane than that of friendship and affection. But what good was it? As soon as I could I did the opposite—I’d grab on to her, trying to kiss her and go further, as though I didn’t know that in situations like ours there was nothing more disagreeable and ill-advised. Good heavens! Was it really possible I couldn’t contain myself? If there’d been a physical relationship of a deeper kind between us than one based on the odd kiss, in that case she might have been able to understand how I . . . how she, so to speak, had got under my skin. But given the relations that had always been between us, my compulsion to embrace her, to rub myself up against her, was the sign of one thing only: my effective heartlessness, my constitutional inability to really care about another person. And what’s more, what did my unexpected absences mean, and my sudden returns, the inquisitional or “tragic” looks, the hangdog silences, the rudenesses, the irrational insinuations—the whole repertoire of rash and embarrassing behavior which I tirelessly exhibited, without the least sense of shame? Perhaps she could have put up with it if these “marital rows” had been reserved for her ears alone, apart from the others. But that her brother and Giampi Malnate should have to be witnesses, this no, and again no, she wouldn’t put up with.

  “Now it seems to me you’re exaggerating,” I said. “When have I ever made a scene in front of Malnate and Alberto?”

  “Always. Continually!”

  Every single time I’d come back after a week of being away—she went on—and declare I’d been to Rome or somewhere, and then I’d start laughing, laughing in nervous fits like a nutcase, without the least reason, did I fool myself into thinking Alberto and Malnate would somehow not notice I was talking bullshit, that I’d never been anywhere near Rome, and that my fits of laughter “straight out of Cena delle beffe”** weren’t all directed toward her? And when in arguing, I’d jump up and start haranguing and screaming like a maniac, frequently taking everything personally—some day or other Giampi would get really annoyed, and he wouldn’t be without some justification, poor thing that he was too!—did I think people would somehow not notice that she was the cause, albeit the innocent one, of all my crazy antics?

  “I understand,” I said, lowering my head. “I really understand that you don’t want to see me any more.”

  “It’s not my fault. It’s you who, bit by bit, have become unbearable.”

  “You said, though,” I stammered after a pause, “you said that I could come round every so often, rather that I have to. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then . . . you must decide. How should I behave so as not to offend you further?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. “I’d say that, to start off with, you should leave a space of at least twenty days. Then you can start visiting again, if you want to. But I beg you, even after, don’t come round more than twice a week.”

  “Tuesdays and Wednesdays, would that do? Like for piano lessons.”

  “You idiot,” she muttered, smiling against her will. “You really are an idiot.”

  • 6 •

  ALTHOUGH THE effort, especially to begin with, was extremely hard, I made it something of a point of honor to observe Micòl’s prohibitions to the letter. Suffice it to say, having graduated on June 29, and having received a warm congratulatory note from Professor Ermanno which contained, among other things, an invitation to dinner, I thought it opportune to refuse, saying I was sorry but I couldn’t. I wrote that I’d been suffering from a bout of tonsillitis, and that my father had stopped me going out in the evenings. My refusal, however, was down to the fact that of the twenty days Micòl had imposed on me, only sixteen had passed.

  The effort was really hard. Though I was hoping that sooner or later there’d be some recompense, my hopes remained somewhat vague: I felt glad to be obeying Micòl and through this obedience I thought I might once more have access to her and to the paradisal regions I’d been shut out from. If before I’d always had something to reproach her with, now I had nothing. I and I alone was the guilty one. How many mistakes I’d made!—I told myself. I thought back over all the times that, often by force, I’d kissed her on the lips, but always and only to put her in the right, who, even in rejecting me, had put up with me for so long, and to feel ashamed of my satyr-like lustfulness, masked as sentimentality and idealism. The twenty days havin
g passed, I risked showing myself again, and, following that, kept rigorously to the twice-weekly visits prescribed. But even this didn’t induce Micòl to descend from the pedestal of purity and moral superiority on which, since being sent into exile, I’d placed her. She continued to stay up there. And I felt myself lucky to keep on being able to admire this distant image of her, no less beautiful inside than she was on the outside. “Like truth itself / like her, sad and beautiful . . . ”: these first two verses of a poem I never finished, though they were written much later, in Rome, soon after the war, refer back to that Micòl of August 1939, and the way I saw her then.

  Chased out of Paradise, I waited in silence to be let back in. And yet I suffered—some days atrociously. It was with the intention somehow to alleviate the weight of an often intolerable distance and solitude that one week, soon after that final, disastrous conversation with Micòl, I had the notion of going to visit Malnate, to keep in contact at least with him.

  I knew where to find him. As Professor Meldolesi once had, he lived in the zone of small villas just outside Porta San Benedetto, between the Canile and the curve of the Doro. At that time, before the building speculation of these last fifteen years wrecked it, this area, even if a bit grey and modest, did not seem at all disagreeable. All on two floors, each one sporting its own little garden, these small villas generally belonged to magistrates, teachers, civil servants, state functionaries, etc., who, should you be passing by in summer after six in the evening, could be spotted beyond the bristling bars of their gates, sometimes in pyjamas, intent on busily watering and pruning their plants or hoeing the soil. Malnate’s resident landlord was one of them, a tribunal judge. He was a Sicilian around fifty, thin as a rake, with long, thick grey hair. As soon as he noticed me, still not off my bike and holding on with both hands to the gate’s pointed uprights as I peered into the garden, he set down the hose with which he’d been watering the flower beds.

  “May I help you?” he asked, approaching.

  “Is Dr. Malnate here?”

  “He lives here. Why?”

  “Is he at home?”

  “Who can say. Do you have an appointment?”

  “I’m a friend of his. I was passing, and I thought I’d stop by for a moment to say hello to him.”

  In the meantime, the judge had covered the ten or so meters which had separated us. And now I could only see the upper part of his bony, fanatical face, his black eyes, piercing as needles, looming above the edge of the metal plate linking the gate’s uprights at the height of a man. He stared at me with suspicion. All the same, the examination must have ended up in my favor, because almost immediately the lock clicked open and I was let in.

  “That way, please,” Judge Lalumòa finally said, lifting his skeletal arm. “Just follow the paving that goes round the house. The little ground-floor door is the one to the doctor’s apartment. Ring the bell. He may not be in. If he isn’t, the door will be opened by my wife, who should be there at the moment, making up his bed.”

  This said, he turned his back on me, and without taking any further notice of me attended once more to his hose.

  Instead of Malnate, a mature, blonde, abundant woman in a dressing gown appeared in the small doorway I’d been directed to.

  “Good evening,” I said. “I was looking for Dr. Malnate.”

  “He hasn’t come back yet,” Signora Lalumòa replied, all kindness, “but he shouldn’t be long. Almost every evening, soon as he gets out of the factory, he goes to play tennis round at the Finzi-Continis, you know, the house in Corso Ercole I . . . But he should, as I said, be back here any moment. Before supper,” she smiled, lowering her eyes in a rapt expression, “before supper he always drops in at the house to see if there’s any mail.”

  I said that I’d come back later, and began to retrieve the bicycle I’d leaned on the wall beside the door. But the Signora insisted I remain. She wanted me to come in and sit down on an armchair, and in the meantime, standing in front of me, she informed me that she herself was Ferrarese, “a pure-blooded Ferrarese,” that she knew my family very well, especially my mother, of whom “something like forty years ago” (so saying she again smiled and bashfully lowered her eyes) she had been a classmate at the Regina Elena elementary school, the one close by the church of San Giuseppe in Carlo Mayr. How was my mother?—she asked. I was, please, not to forget to send her greetings from Edvige, Edvige Santini, and my mother would then certainly know who she was. She made some remarks about the possibly imminent war and, sighing and shaking her head, referred to the Racial Laws, explaining that she had been deprived of “home help” and so had had to organize everything on her own, including the kitchen, and then, having excused herself, she left me alone.

  When the Signora had gone out, I looked around. The room was spacious but with a low ceiling and as well as being a place to sleep in served as a study and sitting room. The rays of the sunset, penetrating the big horizontal window, lit up the motes of dust in the air. I looked around at the furnishings: the divan-bed, half divan, half bed, as was confirmed by the wretched cotton coverlet patterned with red flowers which hid the mattress, the fat white pillow, uncovered and set on its own to one side, the small black table, in a vaguely oriental style, placed between the divan-bed and the single armchair, of imitation leather, on which I was sitting, the fake parchment lampshades scattered about the room, the cream-colored telephone that stood out against the funereal black of an unsteady lawyer’s desk, full of drawers, the crude oil-paintings hung on the walls. And although I told myself that Giampi had a nerve turning up his nose at Alberto’s “twentieth-century” furniture (how could that moral fervor which made him such a stern judge of others let him be so indulgent toward himself and his own things?), suddenly feeling my heart gripped by the thought of Micòl—and it was as though it was she in person gripping my heart, with her own hand—I renewed my solemn resolve to behave well with Malnate, not to quarrel or argue with him anymore. When she found out, Micòl would have to take account of this as well.

  Far off, the siren of one of the sugar factories of Pontelagoscuro sounded. Soon after, a heavy tread made the gravel grind on the garden path.

  The judge’s voice sounded very close by, on the other side of the wall.

  “Ah, Doctor!” he was intoning in his distinctly nasal fashion, “you’ve a friend waiting for you at home.”

  “A friend?” Malnate said coldly. “And who might that be?”

  “Go on, go and see . . . ” the other encouraged him. “I said it was a friend.”

  Tall and fat, taller and fatter than ever, perhaps from the effect of the low ceiling, Malnate appeared at the doorway.

  “Who’d have thought it!” he exclaimed, his eyes wide with surprise as he adjusted his glasses on his nose.

  He came forward, shook me energetically by the hand, and patted me several times on the back. Having always sensed some hostility in him toward me, since we’d first met, it was very odd to find him now so kind, considerate and communicative. What was happening?—I wondered, perplexed. Had he too come to a decision utterly to change his manner toward me? Perhaps. What was clear was that at this time, in his own house, there was nothing in him of the stubborn gainsayer with whom, under the watchful eyes of Alberto and Micòl, I’d so often done battle. It was enough to see him, and I understood: between us, outside the Finzi-Continis’—and to think that in the last period we had quarrelled to the extent of offending each other, and almost actually came to blows!—every motive for conflict was destined to pass away, to dissolve like mist in the sun.

  In the meantime Malnate was talking—in an astonishingly garrulous and cordial way. He asked me if I’d met his landlord while crossing the garden, and if so whether he’d been polite to me. I replied that I’d met him and, laughing, described the whole scene.

  “Just as well.”

  He proceeded to tell me about the judge and his wife, without leaving me time to say I’d already met them both: excellent people—he
said—even if, all considered, their common resolve to protect him from the risks and snares of “the big wide world” made them slightly interfering. Though decidedly anti-Fascist—being an ardent monarchist—the judge didn’t want any problems, and so was continually on the alert, clearly anxious that Malnate, recognizable at a glance as a likely future client of the Special Tribunal—as he’d said on several occasions—shouldn’t secretly bring home any dubious types: for instance any ex-political convict, anyone under surveillance, or some subversive. As regards Signora Edvige, she too was forever on the alert. She spent whole days perched behind the gaps in the blinds at the first-floor window or coming to his door even late at night, when she’d heard him returning. But her fears were of a completely different kind. Like the good Ferrarese she was—for she was Ferrarese, née Santini—she knew only too well, she told him, what the women of the city were like, both married and unmarried. In her view, a young man on his own, a graduate, from elsewhere, furnished with an apartment with its own door, was in great danger. In no time women would have reduced his spine to pulp. And he? He’d always done his very best to reassure her. But it was clear: only when she’d managed to transform him into a sad, beslippered codger in vest and pyjama bottoms, with his nose eternally parked above the kitchen pans, would “Madame” Lalumòa find any peace.

  “Well, in the end, what’s so wrong with that?” I objected. “I seem to remember you often running down restaurants and trattorias.”