by André Aciman
“Sorry, Giampi,” I asked him one evening “but what’s Rugabella? I’ve been to Milan though I can’t claim to know the place. As you’d understand—of all the cities it’s the one I’m most likely to get lost in—it’s even worse than Venice.”
“How can you say that?” he replied with unexpected passion. “You’re referring to a city that’s utterly straight and rational. I can’t see how you dare compare it with Venice, that oppressive, overflowing shithouse!”
But he rapidly calmed down, explaining to me that Rugabella was a street, an old street near the Duomo, where he’d been born, where his parents still lived and where in a few months, perhaps before the year was out—that’s if the Civic Authorities in Milan hadn’t binned his request to be transferred!—he was once more hoping to live.
Because, let’s be honest—he explained—Ferrara is a delightful, small city, lively, engaging in all sorts of ways, including its politics. He counted the two years’ experience he’d gained here as important, not to say essential. But home was always home, there was no one like one’s own mother, and as for the Lombard sky, “so adorable when it was fine,” there was no other sky in the world with which it could be compared.
• 8 •
ONCE THE twentieth day of exile had passed, as I’ve already mentioned, I began once more to visit the Finzi-Contini house, every Tuesday and Friday. But, at a loss as to how I should pass my Sundays—even if I’d wanted to renew my contacts with old school friends such as Nino Bottecchiari or Otello Forti, for example, or with more recent university friends made in the last years at Bologna, there was no possibility since they’d already gone on holiday—after a certain time had lapsed I started going there on Sundays as well. Micòl let this go, and never held me to the letter of our agreement.
We were now most considerate to each other, perhaps over-considerate. Both of us being aware just how precarious the equilibrium we had achieved was, we took pains not to disturb it, to keep ourselves in a safe zone which excluded not only the excessive coldness between us but also any over-familiarity. If Alberto wanted to play—and this happened ever more rarely—I willingly made up the fourth. But most of the time I didn’t even bother to get changed. I preferred to umpire the long, hard singles matches fought out between Micòl and Malnate, or else, seated under the big parasol at the side of the court, to keep Alberto company.
Alberto’s health was worrying me, deeply. I kept thinking about it. I would stare at his face, which looked longer because of the weight he’d lost. I would find myself checking his breathing as it showed in his neck, which by contrast had become fatter and swollen, and I’d feel my heart contract. I felt oppressed by a hidden sense of remorse. There were moments when I would have given anything to see him return to health.
“Why don’t you go away for a while?” I once asked him.
He turned to look at me.
“D’you think I’m low?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say low . . . You seem to me a bit thinner—that’s all. Is the heat annoying you?”
“Certainly is.”
He raised his arms as he breathed in deeply.
“For some time, my dear fellow, breathing has been a real effort. Ah! To go away . . . but where, though?”
“Up in the mountains would do you good. What does your uncle say? Have you been to see him?”
“Of course. Uncle Giulio assures me it’s nothing serious, which must be true, don’t you think? Otherwise he would have prescribed some remedy or other . . . On the contrary, my uncle thinks I should play as much tennis as I want. What more could I ask? It must be the heat that’s bringing me down. Actually I’m hardly eating anything . . . but it’s really nothing.”
“So, given it’s to do with the heat, why not spend a fortnight in the mountains?”
“In the mountains in August? I ask you. And then . . . ” (here, he smiled) “ . . . and then Juden sind unerwünscht everywhere. Had you forgotten?”
“That’s nonsense. It’s not true, for example, of San Martino di Castrozza. One can still go to San Martino, as you could, if you wanted, go to the Venice Lido or to Alberoni . . . There was something about it in last week’s Corriere della Sera.”
“What a bore. To spend the August bank holiday in a hotel, crammed in with sporty flocks of Levis and Cohens, I’m sorry, I can’t say that appeals. I’d prefer to stay where I am until September.”
The next evening, making the most of the new atmosphere of intimacy between me and Malnate, after I’d risked his judgement on my verses, I was determined to talk to him about Alberto’s health. There was no doubt about it—I said: in my view Alberto had something. Hadn’t he noticed the labored way he was breathing? And didn’t it seem strange at the very least that no one at his home, neither his uncle nor his father, had made the smallest effort to work out what was wrong? The medical uncle, the one from Venice, had no faith in medicines, so that can be understood. But the rest of them, including his sister? They were all seraphically calm and smiling—not one of them was lifting a finger.
Malnate listened to me in silence.
“You shouldn’t be so alarmed,” he finally replied, with a slight hint of embarrassment in his voice. “Does he really seem to you so run down?”
“But, good God, can’t you see!” I broke out. “In two months he’s lost ten kilos!”
“That’s going a bit far. Ten kilos are an awful lot!”
“If not ten, it’ll be seven or eight. At the least.”
He fell silent, lost in thought. He admitted that he too, for some time now, had realized that Alberto wasn’t well. On the other hand—he added—were the two of us really sure we weren’t getting worked up over nothing? If his own closest family weren’t concerned, and if not even Professor Ermanno’s face betrayed the least sign of worry, well then . . . That’s the point—if Alberto really had been ill, it was fair to assume that Professor Ermanno wouldn’t even have considered the possibility of bringing two truckloads of shale from Imola for the tennis court! And talking of the tennis court, did I know that in a few days the work to enlarge its famous surrounds was about to start?
So, taking our cue from Alberto and his presumed illness, we had unwittingly introduced into our night-time conversations the new theme, hitherto taboo, of the Finzi-Continis. Both of us were well aware we were walking over a minefield, and for this reason we always proceeded with great caution, very careful not to put a foot wrong. But it’s worth saying that every time we spoke of them as a family, as an “institution”—I’m not sure who first came up with this word but I remember that it gave us some satisfaction and made us laugh—Malnate made free with his criticisms, even the harshest. What impossible people they were!—he’d say. What a strange, absurd tangle of incurable contradictions they represented, “socially”! At times, thinking about the thousands of hectares of land they possessed, and the thousands of laborers who worked it for them, the disciplined, submissive slaves of the Corporative Regime, at times he was tempted to prefer the grim “regular” landlords, those who, in 1920, 1921 and 1922, had hardly paused a moment to fork out for the blackshirt squads with their strong-arm and castor-oil tactics. They “at least” were Fascists. When the occasion presented itself, there wouldn’t be any lingering doubts about how to treat them. But the Finzi-Continis?
And he would shake his head, with the expression of someone who, should they wish to, could even understand such subtleties and complications, but who is just not minded to. Such tiny fine discriminations, intriguing and engaging as they might be, at a certain point became irrelevant: they too would be swept away.
After the August bank holiday, late one night, we had stopped for a drink in a small bar in Via Gorgadello, alongside the Duomo, a few steps away from the place that had been the surgery of Dr. Fadigati, the well-known ENT surgeon. Over several glasses of wine I’d told Malnate the story of the doctor, with whom, in the five months preceding his suicide “for love,” I had become a close friend, the last and o
nly friend he had left in town—when I said “for love” Malnate couldn’t resist a little sarcastic laugh of a typically undergraduate kind. From Fadigati to a more general discussion of homosexuality was just a few steps. On this topic Malnate had very uncomplicated views—like a true goy, I thought to myself. For him, pederasts were nothing but “miserable wretches,” poor “obsessives,” about whom there was no point bothering apart from a medical perspective or with a view to social prevention. By contrast, I maintained that love justified and sanctified everything, even pederasty. I went further, saying that love, when it was pure, by which I meant totally disinterested, is always abnormal, asocial and so on: exactly like art—I added—which when it’s pure, and therefore useless, displeases the priests of every religion, including Socialism. Setting aside our good intentions to be moderate, just this once we went back to arguing almost in our ferocious, earlier style, until the moment when, both of us realizing we were slightly drunk, we simultaneously burst out laughing. After that, we had left the bar, crossed the half-deserted Listone, and gone back up San Romano to find ourselves wandering along Via delle Volte with no particular destination in mind.
Without any sidewalk, its cobbled surface full of holes, the street seemed even darker than usual. While we all but groped our way forward, guided only by the light that squeezed through the half-closed doors of the brothels, Malnate had set off again as usual declaiming some stanza of Porta’s—this time, I remember, it wasn’t from “Ninetta,” but from “Marchionn di gamb avert.”
He recited the lines in a low voice, in the bitter, hurt tone he always assumed for the “Lament”:
Finalment l’alba tance voeult spionada
l’è comparsa anca lee di filidur . .‡‡‡
but at this point he suddenly stopped.
“What would you say,” he asked me, pointing his chin toward a brothel door, “to going in there to look around?”
The proposal was nothing out of the ordinary. And yet, coming from him, with whom I’d only ever had serious discussions, it surprised and embarrassed me.
“It’s not one of the better ones,” I replied. “I reckon it’s one where you pay less than ten lire . . . but why not, if that’s what you want.”
It was late, almost one o’clock, and the welcome that awaited us was far from warm. An old peasant-like woman, seated on a wickerwork chair behind the door, began to make a fuss about not wanting the bicycles brought in. And then the madam, a dry, raw, little woman with glasses, of an indefinable age, dressed in black like a nun, also started complaining about the bicycles and how late it was. Then a servant girl, who was already cleaning the small reception rooms with a worn-out, dusty brush, the handle of a dustpan under her arm, gave us a look full of scorn as we passed through the entrance hall. And even the girls, all gathered together and quietly talking with a small group of clients in a single room, didn’t bother to say hello. None of them came forward to greet us. We waited not less than ten minutes, during which time Malnate and I sat facing each other in the small separate reception room that the madam had taken us away to, not bestowing on us a further word—through the walls the laughter of the girls and the drowsy voices of their client-friends reached us—until a small blonde with a refined air, and hair drawn back above the nape of her neck, soberly dressed like a schoolgirl from a good family, decided to appear in the doorway.
She at least didn’t seem too fed up.
“Good evening,” she greeted us.
She calmly examined us, her blue eyes full of irony.
“And as for you, Little Blue-Eyes, what can we do for you?”
“What’s your name?” I managed to stammer.
“Gisella.”
“Where are you from?”
“Bologna!” she boasted, widening her eyes as if vouchsafing who knows what pleasures.
But it wasn’t true. Calm and in perfect control of himself, Malnate immediately saw through her claim.
“Bologna like hell!” he interjected. “I’d say you were from Lombardy, but not even from Milan. You must be from somewhere around Como.”
“How did you guess that?” the girl asked, astonished.
The madam’s ugly mug had meanwhile loomed behind her back.
“Uh-huh,” she grumbled. “Here as well I can see all that’s happening is a lot of blather.”
“Not at all,” the girl protested, smiling and pointing at me. “Little Blue-Eyes over there has some serious intentions. So should we go?”
I turned toward Malnate. He too was looking at me in an encouraging, affectionate way.
“And you?” I asked.
He made a vague gesture with his hand, and let out a small laugh.
“Don’t think about me. You go on up, and I’ll wait for you.”
Everything happened very quickly. When we came back down, Malnate was chatting with the madam. He’d brought out his pipe, and was talking and smoking. He was finding out about the “financial status” of the prostitutes, their fortnightly “rota” and their “medical check-ups” etc., and the woman was responding with equal attention and care.
“Bon,” Malnate said at last, noticing my presence, and standing up.
We went back into the entrance waiting room, making for the bicycles leaned one on top of the other against the wall beside the street exit, while the madam, now become most considerate, rushed in front to open the door.
“Goodbye, then,” Malnate said to her.
He placed a coin in the doorwoman’s outstretched palm, and went out first.
Gisella had remained in the background.
“Bye, darling,” she said in a sing-song voice. “And come back again!”
She was yawning.
“Bye,” I replied as I went through the door.
“Goodnight, then, gentlemen,” the madam respectfully murmured behind our backs. As she closed the door I heard the bolt slide home.
Leaning on our bikes, we slowly went back up Via Scienze to the corner of Via Mazzini, and then took a right along the Saraceno. Now it was Malnate who mainly spoke. At Milan, some years back—he was telling me—he’d been a fairly regular visitor to the famous San Pietro all’Orto brothel, but it was only tonight that he’d had the idea of gathering precise information about the laws governing the “system.” Christ, what a life whores have to live! And how abject the state was, the so-called “ethical state,” to set up such a market for human flesh!
Here he became aware of my silence.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Aren’t you feeling well?”
“No. I’m fine.”
I heard him sigh.
“Omne animal post coitum triste . . . ” he pronounced melancholically. “Have a good sleep, and you’ll see—tomorrow everything’ll be as right as rain.”
“I know. I know.”
We turned left, down Via Borgo di Sotto, and Malnate nodded toward a modest little house on the right, in the direction of Via Fondo Banchetto.
“That’s where the schoolmistress Trotti must live,” he said.
I didn’t reply. He coughed.
“And so . . . ” he went on, “how are things going with Micòl?”
I was suddenly overwhelmed by a great need to confide in him, to open my heart to him.
“Badly. I have such a terrible crush on her.”
“Well, that we’ve been able to work out,” he said with a friendly laugh. “For some time. But how is it going now? Is she still treating you badly?”
“No. As you’ll have seen, of late we’ve reached a certain modus vivendi.”
“Sure. I’ve noticed you don’t squabble like you used to. I’m glad you’re becoming friends again. It was really absurd.”
My mouth twisted into a grimace, while tears misted over my sight.
Malnate immediately realized what was happening.
“Don’t take it so badly,” he urged me, embarrassed. “You mustn’t let yourself go like this.”
I made an effort to swallow.
“Nonsense,” he replied. “If you only knew how much she cares for you! When you’re not there, and are being spoken of, woe betide anyone who dares say anything against you. She’s like an adder ready to strike. And Alberto respects and really likes you too. I ought to tell you as well that a few days ago—perhaps it was indiscreet of me, I’m sorry—I even recited one of your poems to them. Good Lord! You’ve no idea how much he liked it, how much they both, yes, both of them liked it . . . ”
“I’m not sure what use either their wishing me well or their high opinion is to me.”
We had come out into the little square in front of the church of Santa Maria in Vado. There wasn’t a soul to be seen: neither there, nor the whole length of Via Scandiana up to Montagnone. We went along in silence toward the drinking-fountain beside the churchyard. Malnate leaned down to drink, and after him I drank too, and washed my face.
“Listen,” Malnate continued as he kept on walking, “in my opinion you’re wrong. In times like these, nothing is more important than mutual affection and respect, friendship that is. Besides, it doesn’t seem to me . . . It’s quite possible that in time . . . What I mean is—why not come over and play tennis more often, as you did some months back? And anyway, who says absence is the best strategy? I’ve the feeling, my friend, that you don’t know women very well.”
“But it was she herself who forced me to make my visits less frequent!” I blurted out. “D’you think I can just take no notice? After all, it is her house!”
He remained silent for a few moments, deep in thought.
“It doesn’t seem possible to me,” he said at last. “Perhaps I could understand it, if something . . . really serious, irreparable, had come between you. But what, in the end, has happened?”
He scrutinized me, unsure.
“Forgive my not too . . . diplomatic question,” he went on, and smiled, “but have you got so far at least as to kiss her?”
“I have indeed, many times,” I sighed desperately. “Unfortunately for me.”