by André Aciman
I said I couldn’t that evening, but that tomorrow I’d almost certainly be passing by his house, at the usual time. But if he saw I was late—I added—he shouldn’t wait for me. In that case, we’d meet directly round at Giovanni’s. It was at Giovanni’s he meant to eat?
“Most likely,” he confirmed, curtly. And then:
“Have you heard the news?”
“I’ve heard it.”
“What a mess! Do come, I’m relying on you, and we can talk about everything then.”
“Goodbye for now,” I replied gently.
“Goodbye.”
He hung up.
The next evening, straight after supper, I went out on my bike, and having gone down the whole of the Corso Giovecca, I went and stopped not more than a hundred meters from the restaurant. I wanted to check if Malnate was there, nothing more than that. And, in fact, as soon as I’d ascertained that he was—seated as usual at an open-air table, wearing his eternal flannel jacket—rather than go up to him I doubled back from there to lurk on top of one of the Castle’s three drawbridges, the one facing Giovanni’s. I worked out that this was the best way to observe him without running the risk that he’d notice me. And so it was. With my chest pressed against the stone edge of the parapet, for a long while I observed him as he ate. I watched him and the other clients down there in a line with the wall at their back, I watched the white-jacketed waiters bustling back and forth between the tables, and it seemed to me, in my suspended state, in the dark above the moat’s glassy water, almost as though I was at the theater, a hidden spectator of some pleasant but pointless performance. By now Malnate had started in on the fruit. He was reluctantly nibbling at a big bunch of grapes, one after the other, and every now and then, clearly expecting my arrival, he would turn his head to the left and the right. In doing so, the lenses of his “fat glasses,” as Micòl would call them, glinted: nervously, quiveringly . . . Having finished off the grapes, he called the waiter over with a sign, conferring with him for a moment. I thought he had asked for the bill, and I was already getting ready to leave, when I saw that the waiter was returning with an espresso cup. He drank it in a single swig. After this, from one of the two breast pockets of his flannel jacket, he took out something very small: a notebook, in which he immediately began to write with a pencil. What the hell was he writing?—I smiled to myself. Had he too taken to versifying? And there I left him, all bent and intent over that notebook of his from which, at rare intervals, he would lift his head to peer left and right, or else above, to the starry sky, as though searching for ideas or inspiration.
In the evenings that immediately followed, I kept on wandering haphazardly along the city streets, noticing everything, indiscriminately drawn by everything: by the headlines of newspapers that carpeted the newsagents’ shops of the center, headlines in big, block capitals, underlined in red ink; by the film photographs and announcement posters stuck up beside the cinema entrances; by the chatting clusters of drunks halted in the middle of the alleyways of the old city; by the number plates of the cars parked in a row in Piazza del Duomo; by the various kinds of people leaving the brothels, or appearing in small groups out of the dark undergrowth of the Montagnone to consume ice creams, beers or fizzy drinks at the zinc counter of the kiosk that had recently been installed on the city walls of San Tomaso, at the end of the Scandiana . . .
One evening, around eleven, I found myself again in the vicinity of Piazza Travaglio, peeping into the half-dark interior of the renowned Cafe Scianghai, almost exclusively frequented by street prostitutes and workers from the nearby Borgo San Luca. From there, soon after, I went up onto the city wall above it to spectate a feeble shooting match between two unprepossessing youths competing under the hard eyes of that Tuscan girl who’d been so taken by Malnate.
I stayed there, at the side, without saying anything, or even dismounting from my bike, so that after a while the Tuscan girl addressed me in person.
“Hey, you there, young man,” she said. “Why not step up and shoot a few yourself? Go on, take a risk, don’t be scared. Show these two big sissies what you can do.”
“No thanks,” I replied.
“No thanks,” she repeated. “God, what’s happening to the young today! Where’ve you hidden that friend of yours? That one was a real man! Tell me, have you buried him somewhere?”
I kept silent, and she burst out laughing.
“Poor little thing!” she commiserated with me. “Run along home now, or else your daddy’ll take his belt to you. Go on, run along to your granny.”
The next evening, getting on toward midnight, without even knowing myself why, I was on the opposite side of the city, pedaling along the unpaved track which runs smoothly and sinuously within the circumference of the Mura degli Angeli. There was a magnificent full moon: so clear and bright in the perfectly serene sky as to render the front light unnecessary. I pedaled along briskly. I kept on passing new lovers stretched out on the grass. Some were half-naked, one moving on top of the other. Others, already disentangled, remained close, holding each other by the hand. Others still, embraced but motionless, seemed to be asleep. Along the way I counted more than thirty couples. And though I passed so close to some of them as almost to brush them with my wheels, no one ever gave any sign of noticing my silent presence. I felt like, and was, a kind of strange driven ghost, full both of life and death, of passion and compassion.
Having reached the heights of the Barchetto del Duca, I got off my bike, leaned it against a tree trunk, and for some minutes, turned toward the silver unmoving stretch of the park, I stayed there to watch. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular. I was watching, and, listening to the paltry and immense outpourings of the crickets and frogs, surprised myself by the faint embarrassed smile that stretched my lips. “Here it is,” I said slowly. I didn’t know what to do, what I’d come there to do. I was suffused by a vague sense of the uselessness of any act of commemoration.
I began to walk along the edge of the grassy slope, my eyes fixed on the magna domus. All dark at the Finzi-Contini house. Although I couldn’t see the windows of Micòl’s room, which were south-facing, I was sure just the same that no light whatsoever would be issuing from them. Having at last come to that point exactly above the garden wall which was “sacred,” as Micòl would say, “au vert paradis des amours enfantines,” I was seized by a sudden notion. What if I climbed over the wall and secretly entered the park? As a boy, in that far-off June afternoon, I hadn’t dared do it. I’d been too afraid. But now?
Within a moment I was already down there, at the foot of the wall, encountering once again the same smell of nettles and dung. But the wall itself was different. Perhaps because it had aged ten years (as indeed I too had aged in the meantime, and grown in size and strength) it didn’t seem either as unscalable or as high as I remembered it. After a first failed attempt I lit a match. The footholds were still there, perhaps even more of them. There was even that fat rusty nail still sticking out from the stones. I reached it on my second try, and, grabbing it, it was then easy enough for me to get to the top.
When I was seated up there, with my legs dangling on either side, it didn’t take me long to notice a ladder leaning against the wall a little beneath my shoe. Rather than surprising me, this fact entertained me. “I’ll be damned,” I murmured with a smile, “and there’s the ladder as well.” However, before making use of it, I turned back round toward the Mura degli Angeli. There the tree was, and at its base the bike. It was an old wreck, hardly a tempting prospect for anyone.
I made it down to the ground. After which, leaving the path that ran parallel to the garden wall, I cut down through the meadow scattered with fruit trees, with the intention of reaching the driveway somewhere almost equidistant between Perotti’s farmhouse and the wooden bridge over the Panfilio. I trod the grass without making a sound: struck once in a while, it’s true, by the glimmer of a misgiving, but every time it surfaced I shrugged my shoulders and shed it before it turn
ed to worry and anxiety. How beautiful the Barchetto del Duca was by night—I thought—and how gently lit by the moon! In those milky shadows, in that silvery sea, what else could I want or look for? Even if I’d been surprised wandering about there, no one could have got that worked up about it. On the contrary. If everything was taken into account, I could even claim a certain right to be there.
I came out onto the drive, crossed the Panfilio bridge, and from there, turning left, reached the clearing of the tennis court. Professor Ermanno had kept his promise: the playing area was already being enlarged. The metal wire surround was pulled down, and lay in a luminous tangled heap beside the court, on the opposite side to where the spectators usually sat. A zone of at least three meters beside the side lines and five behind the backcourt seemed to be all ploughed up . . . Alberto was ill. He hadn’t long to live. It was necessary to conceal from him in some, even in that way, the seriousness of his illness. “Good idea,” I agreed, and went on.
I went on out into the open, meaning to make a big circle round the clearing, nor was I surprised at a certain point to see, advancing toward me at a slow trot from the direction of the Hütte, the familiar shape of Jor. I waited stock still for him to arrive, and he too, as soon as he was about ten meters away, came to a halt. “Jor!” I called in a stifled voice. Jor recognized me. After having conveyed to his tail a brief, mildly festive wag, he slowly turned back on his own steps.
Once in a while he would turn round to reassure himself I was following him. I wasn’t following him, or rather, although progressively approaching the Hütte, I didn’t detach myself from the far edge of the clearing. I was walking some twenty meters away from the curving row of huge dark trees that grew in that part of the park, my face continually turned to the left. I now had the moon at my back. The clearing, the tennis court, the big blind spur of the magna domus, and then, in the distance, lying above the leafy tops of the apple trees, the fig trees, the plum trees, the pear trees, there was the city wall, the Mura degli Angeli. Everything looked bright and clear-cut, as though in relief, even more so than by day.
Continuing like this, I suddenly found myself just a few steps away from the Hütte—not in front of it on the side facing the tennis court but behind among the trunks of the young larches and fir trees it was close up against. Here I stopped. I stared at the black, rugged shape of the Hütte against the light. I suddenly felt uncertain, not knowing where to go, what direction to take.
“What should I do?” I was saying in a low voice. “What should I do?”
I kept on staring at the Hütte. Then I began to think—without this thought even making my heart beat faster: accepting it with indifference as stilled water lets light pass through it—I began to think that yes, if after all it was here, at Micòl’s, that Giampi Malnate would come every night after leaving me at the entrance of my house (why not? Wasn’t it perhaps for this that before going out with me to supper he would shave himself with so much care?), well then, in that case the tennis changing-room would have undoubtedly provided them with the best, the most perfect refuge.
But of course—I calmly pursued this line of reasoning in a rapid internal whisper. It has to be. He would go wandering around with me only till it was late enough, and then, having so to speak tucked me up in bed, he would be on his way, pedaling at full speed round to her, already waiting for him in the garden. But of course. Now I understood that gesture of his at the brothel in Via delle Volte! You go ahead. Making love every, or almost every night, it was hardly surprising that there comes a moment when you start missing your Mamma, the Lombard skies and so on. And the ladder against the garden wall? It could only have been Micòl who left it there, in that particular spot.
I was lucid, calm and clear. Everything added up. As in a jigsaw puzzle every piece fitted exactly.
Sure it was Micòl. With Giampi Malnate. The close friend of her sick brother. In secret from her brother and all the others in the house, parents, relatives, servants, and always at night. In the Hütte as a rule, but then perhaps even upstairs, in her bedroom, the room of the làttimi. Entirely in secret? Or rather had the others as ever pretended not to see, let it go on, even slyly approved of it, considering it only human and right that a twenty-three-year-old girl, if she didn’t want to or wasn’t able to marry, should all the same have everything that nature required. They, there at the house, even pretended not to notice. Alberto’s illness. It was their system.
I listened out. Absolute silence.
And Jor? Where had he got to?
I took several steps on tiptoe toward the Hütte.
“Jor!” I called out, loudly.
And then, as if in response, from far away through the night air came a sound—feeble, heartbroken, almost human. I knew it immediately: it was the sound of the dear old voice of the piazza clock, striking the hours and the quarters. What was it telling? It was telling that once again I’d been out very late, that it was stupid and wicked of me to keep on in this way torturing my father, who, that night as well, worried because I hadn’t returned home, would probably not have been able to get any sleep, and that now it was time that I gave him some peace. For good. For ever after.
“What a great novel,” I grinned, shaking my head as if at an incorrigible child.
And turning my back on the Hütte, I made my way off among the plants in the opposite direction.
* Ferrarese dialect with Veneto inflection: “Don’t ask me!”
† Ferrarese dialect: “flaming.”
‡ Israel Zangwill (1864–1926): London-born Jewish writer, pacifist, supporter of women’s suffrage, and involved in the Zionist aspiration to found a Jewish homeland.
§ In English in the original.
¶ Ferrarese dialect: “gang.”
# One of the principal characters in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi.
** The Feast of the Jesters (play by Sam Benelli, 1909).
†† A movement in Italian poetry in the early years of the twentieth century, often accused of vagueness and melancholy, whose major figures included Guido Gozzano, Corrado Govoni and Sergio Corazzini.
‡‡ “Don’t ask from us the word squared off on every side.”
§§ “[All that we can tell you today] is what we are not, what we don’t want.” (Last line of the Montale poem of which the first line was quoted above.)
¶¶ Good on you, Baldissar! Well done at last, you midget! It was about time too you’d come to see me: d’you realize, you mad pig, it’s nearly a month you’ve not been here to fuck me? Ah, Jesus! Jesus! How cold these hands have got!
## All of these poems are in Milanese dialect. No, Ghittina: I’m incapable of betraying you: no, of that you can be sure. You oughtn’t to lump me together with rascals and disreputables.
*** Soldiers, fleeing from Lombardy . . .
††† Think and toil, watch and listen, the longer you live the more you learn; me, should I be born one more time, I’d be born a doorwoman’s cat! For example, in Rugabella, if I were born as Signor Pinin’s cat . . . . . . [there’d be] bags of heart scraps, mince and liver, the master’s cap to sleep on top of . . .
‡‡‡ At last the dawn, so long looked out for, herself appears between the shutter’s slats . . .
§§§ Ferrarese dialect: “Where on earth have the two of you been, out making trouble?”
¶¶¶ Ferrarese dialect: “black business.”
Epilogue
THE story of my relationship with Micòl Finzi-Contini ends here. And so it is right that this story also has an end, now, since anything I might add to it has nothing to do with her, but only, should it go on, with me.
I’ve already told at the beginning what was her fate, and her family’s fate.
Alberto died before the others of a malign lymphogranuloma, in 1942, after a long agony in which, despite the deep chasm dug between its citizens by the Racial Laws, the whole of Ferrara was concerned at a distance. He suffocated. To help him breathe, oxygen was needed, in ever greater quant
ities. And since, in the city, because of the war, the canisters for oxygen had grown scarce, in the later stages the family had involved itself in a stockpiling operation across the whole region, sending people out to buy them, at whatever price, in Bologna, Ravenna, Rimini, Parma, Piacenza . . .
The others, in September 1943, were captured by the repubblichini.* After a brief stay in the jail at Via Piangipane, the following November they were sent to the concentration camp at Fòssoli, near Carpi, and from there, later on, to Germany. With regard to myself, however, I should say that in the four years between the summer of 1939 and the autumn of 1943 I never again saw any of them. Not even Micòl. At Alberto’s funeral, from behind the windows of the old Dilambda, converted to running on methane, which followed the cortège at a walking pace, and which as soon as it crossed the entrance of the cemetery at the end of Via Montebello immediately turned back, it seemed to me, for a moment, that I could make out her ash-blonde hair. Nothing more than that. Even in a city as small as Ferrara it’s easy enough, if you should want, to disappear from each other for years and years, to live together as the dead do.
As for Malnate, who had been called back to Milan from November 1939 (he’d tried in vain to phone me in September, and had even gone so far as to write me a letter . . . ), I never even saw him again after August of that year. Poor Giampi. He believed in the honest Lombard and Communist future which smiled down on him, then, in the dark days of the impending war: a distant future—he admitted—but one that was sure and infallible. But what does the heart really know? If I think of him, sent off to the Russian Front with the CSIR,† in 1941, never to return, I still have a vivid memory of how Micòl would react every time, between one tennis match and the next, he’d start off again “catechizing” us. He would speak in that low, quiet, humming voice of his. But Micòl, in contrast to me, never took much heed of what he said. She’d never stop sniggering, goading, and making fun of him.