by André Aciman
“That’s true,” he admitted with unusual compliance—a compliance that kept astonishing me. “And besides there’s no point in it. Freedom’s undoubtedly a wonderful thing, but unless there’s some limit set to it” (he winked at me as he said this) “who knows where it’ll all end?”
It was starting to get dark. Malnate got up from the divan-bed where he’d stretched out his considerable length, went to turn on the light, and then into the bathroom. He needed a shave—I heard from there. Would I give him the time to shave? Afterward we could go out together.
We kept the conversation going in this way—he in the bathroom, I in the sitting room.
He mentioned that also that afternoon he’d been round at the Finzi-Continis’, and had in fact just come back from there. They had played for more than two hours—first him and Micòl, then him and Alberto, and finally all three together. Did I like playing American doubles?
“Not much,” I replied.
“I can understand that,” he agreed. “For someone like you who knows how to play, American doubles doesn’t make much sense. But it can be fun.”
“So who won?”
“The American doubles?”
“Yes.”
“Micòl, naturally!” he said with a snigger. “My respect to anyone who can contain her. Even on the court she’s like a whirlwind . . . ”
He then asked me why for some days I’d not shown my face. Had I been away somewhere?
Remembering what Micòl had told me, that no one believed me when, after each of my absences, I said that I’d been away on a trip, I replied that I’d got tired of going round and that, often, in the last period, I’d anyway had the impression my presence was irksome, above all to Micòl, and for this reason I’d decided to “keep a bit of a distance.”
“What are you saying?” he asked in surprise. “Far as I can see, Micòl has nothing at all against you. Are you sure you’re not mistaken?”
“Sure as can be.”
He sighed, letting it pass. I too had nothing to add. Soon after, he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven and smiling. He realized I was looking at the ugly pictures on the walls.
“So then,” he asked “how does it strike you, this big mouse-trap of mine? You’ve yet to bestow your opinion.”
He grinned in his old manner, waiting in the doorway for my reply, but at the same time, I could see it in his eyes, determined not to take offence.
“I envy you,” I replied. “If only I could have something similar at my disposal. I’ve always dreamed of something like this.”
He threw me a gladdened look. It was true—he consented: even he could clearly see the limits of the Lalumòa couple’s sense of furnishings. And yet their taste, typical of the petit bourgeois (“and it’s not for nothing”—he added parenthetically—“they represent the very core and backbone of the nation”), always had something lively, vital, healthy about it—and this was probably directly related to its obviousness and vulgarity.
“After all, things are just things,” he concluded. “Why become a slave to them?”
Should Alberto be considered in this light—he went on—it would be hard on him! With his determination to surround himself with exquisite, perfect, flawless things, one day or another he too will end up becoming . . .
He made toward the door without finishing his sentence.
“How is he?” I asked.
I too had got up, and had reached him at the doorway.
“Who, Alberto?” he said with a start.
I nodded.
“That’s right,” I added. “Of late he’s seemed to me a bit tired and done in. Don’t you think so? I have the feeling he’s not well.”
He drew in his shoulders, then turned off the light. He went on out into the darkness in front of me and said nothing more till we reached the gate, except halfway there to return a “Good evening” to Signora Lalumòa who had appeared at a window. Then at the gate he suggested I go with him to have supper at Giovanni’s.
• 7 •
I HAD no illusions, however. I realized even then that Malnate was perfectly aware of all the reasons, without exception, which kept me away from the Finzi-Continis. Despite this, in the talks we had the topic never surfaced again. On the theme of the Finzi-Continis we both displayed an exceptional reserve and delicacy, and I was especially grateful that he pretended to believe all I’d said on the subject that first evening—grateful, in short, that he was prepared to play along with me and back me up.
We saw each other almost every evening. From the first days of June the heat had suddenly become stifling and emptied the city. Usually it was I who went round to his house, between seven and eight. When I found nobody there, I waited patiently for his return, sometimes entertained by the chatting of Signora Edvige. But most times, there he was, stretched out on his divan-bed in his vest, his hands joined behind his neck and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, or else sitting writing a letter to his mother, to whom he was attached with a deep, slightly exaggerated affection. As soon as he saw me, he’d rush to the bathroom to shave, and after this, we would go out, it being understood that we would also eat out together.
Usually we’d go to Giovanni’s, sitting outside, in front of the Castle’s towers which loomed above us like the walls of the Dolomites, and, like them, the tops of its towers were aglow with the last of the daylight. Or else we’d go to the Voltini, a trattoria outside Porta Reno. Sitting at its tables lined up under a graceful colonnade, exposed to the midday sun and, at that time, open to the countryside, it was possible to look out as far as the huge fields of the airport. On hotter evenings, however, instead of heading toward the city, we made our way out along the lovely street of Pontelagoscuro, crossed the iron bridge over the Po, and pedaling side by side to the top of the embankment, with the river on our right and with the Veneto countryside on our left, after another fifteen minutes, halfway between Pontelagoscuro and Polesella, we reached the big, solitary Dogana Vecchia, famous for its fried eels. We always ate very slowly, and sat on at the table till late, drinking Lambrusco and Vinello di Bosco and smoking our pipes. If we had dined in town, at a certain point we’d put down our napkins, each paying our own bills, and then, wheeling our bikes, we’d begin to stroll along the Corso Giovecca, up and down from the Castle to the Prospettiva Arch, or else along Viale Cavour, from the Castle as far as the station. Then it was he, usually around midnight, who would offer to accompany me back home. He would glance at his watch, announce that it was bedtime (he’d often solemnly remark, that even though the factory sirens only sounded at eight o’clock for them, the technicians, they always needed to be out of bed by quarter to seven “at the latest”), and however much I would sometimes insist I accompany him, there was never an occasion when he let me. The last image I’d have of him was always the same: motionless in the middle of the street, astride his bike, he would be waiting there to check I’d properly closed the door on him.
On two or three evenings, after our meal, we ended up on the city walls near Porta Reno, where, that summer, an amusement park had been put up in the opening which lay between the gasometer on one side and Piazza Travaglio on the other. It was a cut-price affair, half a dozen huts with coconut shies huddled round the grey, patchworked canvas mushroom of a small equestrian circus. The place attracted me. I was drawn to and touched by the sad group of impoverished prostitutes, young thugs, soldiers, and a few wretched pederasts from the outskirts, who customarily frequented it. I quoted Apollinaire in an undertone, and Ungaretti. And though Malnate, somewhat with the air of being dragged along against his will, accused me of “second-hand Crepuscularism,”†† deep down it also pleased him, after we had dined at the Voltini, to go up there, into the big dusty square, to hang about eating slices of watermelon near the acetylene lamp of a coconut shy, or to try our luck for some twenty minutes shooting at the bull’s-eye. Giampi was an excellent shot. Tall and corpulent, standing out in the well-pressed cream-colored flannel jacket I’d seen him wea
ring since the beginning of the summer, calm as could be in taking his aim through his thick lenses rimmed with tortoiseshell, he’d obviously taken the fancy of the heavily made-up and foul-mouthed Tuscan girl—a kind of queen there—at whose stall, as soon as we could be seen on the stone staircase which led from Piazza Travaglio to the top of the city wall, we were imperiously invited to stop. While Malnate took his aim, she, the girl, let loose a stream of sarcastic compliments with an undercurrent of obscenity, which he parried with great wit and with that calm detachment typical of someone who has spent many hours of his youth in a brothel.
One particularly airless August evening we happened, instead, to be in an open-air cinema where, I remember, they were showing a German film with Cristina Söderbaum. We had come in when the show had already begun, and without paying any attention to Malnate, who kept telling me to be careful, to stop making a racket, since it just wasn’t worth it, I’d already begun whispering ironic comments before we’d even sat down. Malnate was only too right. In fact, suddenly getting to his feet against the milky background of the screen, a man in the row in front of me told me in a threatening manner to shut up. I replied with an insult, and he began to shout in dialect: “Get out, you filthy Jew!” and jumped on me, grabbing me by the neck. Luckily for me, Malnate, without saying a word, was ready to shove my assailant back into his seat and drag me away.
“You’re a complete idiot,” he shouted at me, after we’d both hurriedly collected the bicycles we’d left in the bike racks. “And now, beat it, and you’d better pray to that God of yours that scumbag in there was only guessing.”
In this manner, one after another, we passed our evenings together, with the perpetual air of congratulating ourselves that now, in contrast to when Alberto was present, we managed to converse without coming to blows. It never seemed to cross our minds that with a simple phone call, Alberto might have come out too to stroll around with us.
We set aside all political topics. Both being sure that France and England, whose diplomatic missions had already reached Moscow some time ago, would end up in accord with the USSR—the agreement we believed inevitable would have saved Poland’s independence as well as averting a war, provoking as a consequence not just the collapse of the Pact of Steel but also the fall at least of Mussolini—it was now of literature and art that we almost always spoke. While his manner remained calm, without ever becoming polemical (besides—he affirmed—he could only understand art up to a certain point, it wasn’t his thing), Malnate upheld a kind of rigid veto against everything I most loved: Eliot and Montale, García Lorca and Yesenin. He’d hear me out as I gave an impassioned recitation of “Non chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato,”‡‡ or passages from the “Lament for Ignazio Sánchez Mejías,” and in vain I’d hope to have got through to him, to have converted him to my taste. Shaking his head, he’d declare that no, Montale’s “ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo”§§ left him cold, indifferent; that true poetry shouldn’t be founded on negation (don’t bring in Leopardi, please! Leopardi’s a different matter, and anyway he’d written his “Ginestra,” I oughtn’t to forget . . . ) but rather, on the contrary, it was founded on affirmation, on the Yes that the Poet in the final analysis had no choice but to raise up against the hostility of Nature and against Death. Even Morandi’s paintings didn’t convince him—he told me: so refined, undoubtedly delicate, but in his view too “subjective” and “unanchored.” A fear of reality, a fear of making mistakes: that was what Morandi’s still lifes, his famous paintings of bottles and flower bouquets, expressed deep down. And fear, in art as well, had always been the worst adviser . . . Against all this, not without cursing him in secret, I never found any effective counterargument. The thought that the next afternoon, he, the lucky one, would certainly be seeing Alberto and Micòl, perhaps talking to them about me, was enough to make me put aside any empty wish to rebel, and forced me to withdraw into my shell.
Despite this I would sometimes champ at the bit.
“Well, after all, you too,” I objected one evening, “you too indulge in the same radical negation toward contemporary literature, the only living one, that you can’t abide when it, our literature, shows the same toward life. Does this seem fair to you? Your ideal poets remain Victor Hugo and Carducci. Admit it.”
“And why shouldn’t they be?” he replied. “In my opinion Carducci’s republican poetry, written before his political conversion, or rather, his infantile reversion to classicism and monarchism, still needs to be entirely rediscovered. Have you read those poems recently? Try them, and you’ll see.”
I answered that I hadn’t reread them, and had no desire to do so. For me they too were empty “trumpetings,” boringly stuffed full of patriotic rhetoric, and incomprehensible to boot. Though precisely because they were incomprehensible, there was something amusing—and in the end, “surreal”—about them.
On another evening, however, not so much because I wanted to cut a good figure, but rather driven by an undefined need to confess, to open myself up, which I’d been feeling the pressure of for some time, I gave in to the temptation to recite a poem of mine to him. I’d written it in the train, returning from Bologna after the graduation thesis viva, and although for some weeks I continued to believe that it faithfully reflected the deep desolation I felt at that time, the disgust I felt for myself, gradually as I recited it to Malnate, I clearly saw, with unease rather than dismay, all the falsity of emotion in it, how “literary” it was. We were walking along the Corso Giovecca, down toward the Prospettiva Arch, beyond which the dark of the countryside was thickening into a kind of black wall. I declaimed the poem slowly, making myself stress the rhythm, overloading my voice with pathos in the attempt to pass off my damaged goods as the real thing, but ever more convinced, as I approached the ending, of the inevitable failure of my performance. And yet I was wrong. As soon as I finished, Malnate looked at me with remarkable seriousness, then, leaving me gaping, assured me that he had liked the poem very much indeed. He asked me to recite it a second time (and I immediately obliged him). After which he affirmed that in his modest opinion my “lyric,” on its own, was worth more than all “the feeble efforts of Montale and Ungaretti combined.” He could feel real suffering within it, a “moral commitment” absolutely new, and authentic. Was Malnate being sincere? At least on that occasion, I’m convinced he was. And from that evening on he started loudly repeating my verses, and kept on maintaining that in those few lines it was possible to glimpse an escape for contemporary Italian poetry from the sad toils of Calligraphism and Hermeticism. As for me, I’m not ashamed to admit that it wasn’t at all unpleasant listening to these views of his. Faced with his hyperbolic praises, I confined myself to launching the occasional feeble protest, my heart overflowing with gratitude and hope. Looking back now, I’m far more inclined to find this moving rather than contemptible.
In any case, on the subject of Malnate’s taste in poetry, I feel obliged to add that neither Carducci nor Victor Hugo were really his favorite authors. He respected Carducci and Hugo, as an anti-Fascist, as a Marxist. But as a good citizen of Milan, his great passion was Porta, a poet to whom, before then, I’d always preferred Belli, but I was wrong, Malnate argued; how could I compare the funereal “Counter-Reformation” monotony of Belli with the variety and human warmth of Porta?
He could quote hundreds of his verses from memory.
Bravo el mè Baldissar! Bravo el mè nan!
L’eva poeù vora de vegnò a trovamm:
t’el seet mattascion porch che maneman
l’è on mes che no te vegnet a ciollamm?
Ah Cristo! Cristo! Com’hin frecc sti man!¶¶
he liked to declaim in his deep, slightly raucous Milanese accent, every night when, out strolling, we approached Via Sacca or Via Colomba, or dawdlingly made toward Via delle Volte, peeping through the half-closed doors at the lit-up interiors of brothels. He knew the whole of “Ninetta del Verzee” by heart, and it was him who really ta
ught me to appreciate it.
Threatening me with his finger, narrowing his eyes at me with a sly and suggestive expression—suggestive, I supposed, of some remote episode of his Milanese adolescence—he would often murmur:
Nò Ghittin: no sont capazz
de traditt: nò, stà pur franca.
Mettem minga insemma a mazz
coj gingitt e cont’i s’cianca . . . ##
and so on. Or else in a heartfelt, bitter tone he would set about:
Paracar, scappee de Lombardia . . . ***
underscoring every verse of the sonnet with winks, directed naturally toward the Fascists rather than Napoleon’s Frenchmen.
He quoted from the poetry of Ragazzoni and Delio Tessa with just as much enthusiasm and involvement, especially from Tessa, whose work (as I didn’t fail to point out to him) seemed to me not to merit the epithet of “classic” poet, overladen as it was with a “Crepuscular,” decadent sensibility. Yet the truth was that anything that had any connection whatsoever with Milan or its dialect always made him uncharacteristically indulgent. Concerning Milan, he was disposed to accept anything: everything to do with it induced in him a tolerant smile. In Milan even literary decadence, even Fascism itself, had some positive attribute.
He would declaim:
Pensa ed opra, varde e scolta,
tant se viv e tant se impara;
mi, quand nassi on’altra volta,
nassi on gatt de portinara!
Per esempi, in Rugabella,
nassi el gatt del sur Pinin . . .
. . . scartoseij de coradella,
polpa e fidegh, barretin
del patron per dormigh sora . . . †††
and laugh to himself, laugh aloud with tenderness and nostalgia.
Obviously I didn’t understand everything in Milanese, and when I didn’t I’d question him.