by André Aciman
“But then, whose side are you on? The Fascists’?” I remember him asking her one day, shaking his big, sweaty head. He didn’t understand.
So what had there been between the two of them? Nothing? Who knows.
It was really almost as if, with some presentiment of her own and her family’s approaching end, Micòl would continually repeat even to Malnate that she didn’t care a fig for his democratic and Socialist future, that for the future, in itself, she only harbored an abhorrence, far preferring to it “le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui” and preferring the past even more, “the dear, the sweet, the sacred past.”‡
And since these, I know, were only words, the usual desperate, deceptive words that only a true kiss would have been able to stop her saying, with these words and just these, the little that the heart has been able to recall will here be sealed.
* Supporters of the Fascist Italian Social Republic, established under Mussolini in the north of Italy following his rescue by the Germans from captivity.
† Corpo di Spedizione Italiano in Russia: Italian expeditionary force sent to Russia in 1941.
‡ The first quotation is from a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé (“The virginal, evergreen, beautiful today”), and the second (“il caro, il dolce, il pio passato”) is from GiosuéCarducci.
: IV :
Behind the Door
1.
I’VE been unhappy many times in my life, as a child, as a boy, as a man; many times, if I think about it, I’ve touched what are called the depths of despair. And yet I can recall few periods blacker for me than the months from October 1929 to June 1930, when I had just started the ginnasio superiore.* The years lived since then have not, in the end, been of any use: I haven’t managed to remedy the suffering which has remained there like a hidden wound, secretly bleeding. To cure it? To be rid of it? I don’t know if that will ever be possible.
From the first days there, I had felt out of place and deeply uneasy. I didn’t like the classroom where they had put us, at the end of a dark corridor; such a far cry from the happy and familiar one, on to which opened the thirteen doors of the ginnasio inferiore classrooms, which were divided into three lower sections and two higher. I didn’t like the new teachers, with their aloof, ironic manner that discouraged any warmth, any friendly relations—they used the formal “Lei” with all of us!—even when it didn’t actually threaten that in the immediate future we’d be subjected to regimes almost as harsh and severe as a prison, as was the case with Guzzo, the Latin teacher, or Signora Krauss, who taught chemistry and natural sciences. I didn’t like my new companions, who had come from 5A and with whom we of 5B had been amalgamated. They seemed so different from us, maybe cleverer than us, better-looking than us and from better families than ours. They were, to sum up, irremediably foreign to us. And so I could neither understand nor condone the behavior of many of our own who, unlike me, had quickly sought to make common cause with them, rewarded, as I noted with consternation, by a reciprocal warmth and an equally easy-going acquiescence. How could that be possible, even conceivable? I wondered with discontent and jealousy. My keeping of the faith, crudely offended even on the first day of school, when I caught sight of Meldolesi, our beloved fifth-form literature teacher, disappearing into the distance at the head of his new fourth form down the school corridor (from now on a forbidden place where we could no longer set foot); my absurd faith would have wanted an invisible line of demarcation to continue, keeping apart the remainder of the two old fifth forms even at upper school, in such a way that we of the B class would be protected and safeguarded from any betrayal, from any contamination.
But the event that undoubtedly embittered me most was that Otello Forti, the old friend I’d shared a desk with from primary school, hadn’t managed to pass the fifth-form exam—I myself, the year before, had to retake mathematics in October, but he, although earlier he had only had to retake English, had been failed definitively that October. Not only did I now no longer have him seated as ever on my right, but I couldn’t even meet him outside at the school gates, at midday, to walk back along the Corso Giovecca together, each of us going to our respective homes—nor could I meet him at the Montagnone to play soccer in the afternoon, nor at his house, most of all, his lovely, big, happy house, full of brothers and sisters, of boy and girl cousins, where I had passed the greater part of my adolescence—since Otello, poor thing, unable to bear his unfair failure, had got his father’s permission to repeat the fifth year at Padua in a boarding school run by the Barnabite Order. Deprived of Otello, no longer able to enjoy his massive, slightly obtuse presence at my side, his body so much bigger and heavier than mine, no longer to be stimulated or even goaded by the gruff, ironic, but still affectionate reserve which he always deployed at my expense, whenever, either at his house or mine, we did our homework together. Right from the start I’d felt that persistent pain, the inconsolable emptiness of the bereaved. What did it matter that he wrote some letters to me from Padua in which, with an eloquence that astonished me—I’d never had him pegged as very intelligent—he poured out all his affection? What did it matter that I replied to him with no lesser effusions? I was now at the liceo, he was stuck in the ginnasio. I was at Ferrara and he at Padua—this was the insuperable reality which he, with the courage, unexpected clear-sightedness and maturity of all defeated souls, showed himself even more aware of than I was. I wrote to him: “We’ll see each other at Christmas.” And he replied, that yes, at Christmas, some two and a half months off, perhaps we would meet again (on condition he obtained, as he swore to himself he would, the right grades in all his subjects—something that was by no means certain!), but anyway, ten or so days spent together wouldn’t really alter the situation. He seemed to be suggesting: “Go on, forget me! If you haven’t made another friend yet, go out and find one!” No, writing to each other achieved very little. So little, in fact, that after the holidays at the beginning of November, after All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, then Armistice Day, by unspoken agreement, we gave up altogether.
I needed to vent my unhappiness, to show it. So, on the first day of school I made sure that I didn’t join the usual stampede to grab the best desks, the ones closest to the teacher’s podium, at which, at the beginning of every year, my school companions would launch themselves. Leaving this battle to the others, to ours and theirs, I held back at the doorway of the classroom to observe the scene with distaste, and in the end, went so far as to sit down, down there by the window, at the furthest corner desk reserved for the girls. It was the only seat left unoccupied: a big desk, ill-adapted to my less than average size, but perfectly befitting my intense desire to be in exile. Who knows how many slovenly failures and year-repeaters it had been host to before me! I thought to myself. I read on the tarry surface of the tilted desktop all that had been carved by the penknives of my predecessors (mainly invectives against the whole teaching body, but especially against the headmaster, Turolla, nicknamed Halfpint). Looking around, over the thirty-odd heads and necks bent over in an orderly fashion in front of me, I was filled with acrimony. My recent failure in math still riled me. I was in a hurry to reestablish myself, to be considered once again one of the best and brightest pupils. And yet, for the first time, I understood the perspective of the idlers in the back row. School seen as a prison, the headmaster as its warden, the teachers as its guards and my school companions as fellow jailbirds: a system, in short, in which any eager collaboration should be resisted, while every chance to denigrate and sabotage it should be embraced. Those waves of anarchic scorn that, with a touch of fear, I had felt surging from the back of the class since primary school, how well I now understood them!
I scanned the scene before me and disapproved of all and sundry. The girls, humiliated by having to wear their black smocks, as a group amounted to nothing. Just little girls, the four who occupied the first two double desks, all of whom came from 5A; with their tight pigtails swaying on their slender backs, they seemed like kiddies
from the kindergarten. What were they called? Their surnames all ended in ini : Bergamini, Bolognini, Santini, Scanavini, Zaccarini—that sort of thing, which brought to mind, with their diminutives, the most petit-bourgeois of families—milliners, delicatessen shopkeepers, book-binders, council employees and so on. The two girls at the third desk, Cavicchi and Gabrieli, the first very fat, the second bony and skinny with the pallid, spotty face of a thirty-year-old spinster, represented what remained of 5B’s “females”: hunched and greyish, undoubtedly the two ugliest girls, destined to work as pharmacists or schoolmistresses and to be reckoned as mere objects, things. The remaining three girls positioned at the fourth and fifth desks—Balboni and Jovine at the fourth and Manoja alone at the fifth—came from outside the city: Balboni from the countryside—you could see that clearly enough from the way she was dressed, poor thing; her mother might well have been the village dressmaker, a position acquired without exacting qualifications, and likely it was she who had constructed those dresses . . . and Jovine came from Potenza, Manoja from Viterbo. These two were probably part of the retinue of low-grade civil servants or railway employees transferred to northern Italy as a reward for special merit. How sad and boring! Was it some kind of rule that girls who continued their studies always had to look like this, dejected, characterless crones (who didn’t even wash that often judging by the odor of mold that wafted from them), while beauties such as Legnani and Bertoni, for example, the two vamps of 5B, were promptly failed? But Legnani and Bertoni couldn’t have cared less. The former was, it seemed, about to get married; with her wasp waist, her short, shiny black fringe and those wicked eyes like the starlet Elsa Merlini’s—fat chance that she’d repeat the fifth form! She was the type to slink off to Rome to become an actress—as we’d often heard her say. She wasn’t likely to rot away behind the door of the liceo!
But it was the boys who were the main target of my criticism, especially the two pairs who occupied the desks in the center row facing the teacher’s podium. Down there, in the first and second desks, 5A had planted all of three interlopers, Boldoni, Grassi and Droghetti, beside whom in the second desk sat Florestano Donaddio from 5B, who seemed an uninvited but tolerated guest, abject as he was in his physique, in his studies, in everything. The son of a cavalry officer, with that irreproachable and stupid look of his that convinced you he was sure to follow exactly in his father’s footsteps, Droghetti was certainly a mediocrity. But the two in front, Boldini and Grassi, among the brightest and best of 5A, together represented a real force, and the small-statured, rosy-cheeked and blond Donadio, wee timorous creature that he’d always been, had evidently offered himself as their assistant and vassal. Another baleful combination sat in the third row: Giovannini from B and Camurri from A. For the sake of clarity, it wasn’t that Giovannini was any worse than the other—despite coming from the country, the good Walter even managed to speak a reasonably convincing Italian. But Camurri was upper class: ugly, short sighted and sanctimonious, but upper class. His family—who didn’t know of the Camurris of Via Carlo Mayr?—was among the richest in the city. They owned hundreds of hectares in the Codigoro area, precisely in that part of the country from which Walter came, so it wasn’t at all unlikely that his grandfather and father had once been, or even still were, in service to the Camurri household . . . In the fourth row alone—who knows why, unless it showed that no one had sufficiently aristocratic lineage to be beside him, sat Cattolica, Carlo Cattolica, who from primary school onward had always been the undisputed genius of the A class (regularly receiving top marks in every subject). Although it might seem improbable, it was no sweat for him to communicate, if need be, with the no less trusted Boldini and Grasso in the first row via the dependable backs of Camurri and Droghetti leaning over their desks in front of him. It was a marvel to behold how they managed this in Greek and Latin classes. Messages were passed from the fourth row to the first, and vice versa, with the same ease as if they’d had a field telephone at their disposal.
Behind Cattolica, two of ours: Mazzanti and Malagù, two nonentities, more or less. And, on my right, leaning over their desks with the sole aim of ducking down and escaping the eagle eyes of the teacher as much as possible, sat Veronesi and Danieli, the first at least twenty and the second even older: a pair inured to continually repeating the year, veteran slackers, useless even at sport, and for years regular frequenters of brothels. And even if the places in the row of desks closest to the door, those in front of the blackboard, seemed a slightly better assortment (in the second desk Giorgio Selmi had ended up next to Chieregatti, in the third Ballerini had managed to place himself once again with the inseparable Giovanardi), how could I resign myself to be paired with Lattuga in the fourth desk, the wretched, stinking Lattuga, who throughout his days at school had rarely found anyone willing to sit beside him, and this year too, like Cattolica, though for completely different reasons, had remained all alone. No, no, far better the solitude of the place I had chosen in the row of girls. Bianchi, the Italian teacher, had begun his series of lessons by declaiming one of Dante’s “Canzoni,” and one verse had especially struck me: “The exile imposed on me I hold as an honor.” That could have been my banner and motto.
One day I was distractedly looking out of the big window to my left at the glum courtyard inhabited by starved cats which separated the Guarini School building, a former convent, from the side of the Gesù Church. I was thinking that after all it would have been good if, for example, Giorgio Selmi, who had always seemed at heart a likeable boy, had taken the initiative on the first day of school to ask me to share with him. Selmi was an orphan whose father and mother were both dead. He lived with his brother Luigi at the house of his paternal uncle, the lawyer Armando, a grumpy bachelor of about sixty who couldn’t wait to be rid of his nephews, having found a place for one of them in the military academy at Modena and the other in the Livorno Naval Academy. And yet, why on earth had Giorgio preferred to put himself beside that grim hunchback Chieregatti rather than me? His uncle’s apartment in Piazza Sacrati—legal offices annexed to a few rooms that served as living quarters—certainly wouldn’t have sufficed for the two of us to do our homework in, if it was true that he, Giorgio, had to study in his bedroom, a broom cupboard of barely three by four meters. By contrast, at my house, we would have had all the space we needed at our disposal. My study was big enough for me, him and whoever else might have wanted to join our partnership. Besides, my mother, delighted that I was now spending my afternoons at home, and not at Forti’s house as I had done at the ginnasio—would have brought us who knows what splendid snacks at five o’clock, accompanied by tea, butter and jam! It really was a shame that Giorgio Selmi hadn’t chosen to pair up with me. No doubt this was a result of envy, of jealousy. My home was too fine and comfortable compared to his. And then, I had a mother, and he didn’t—all he had was a scurvy old uncle. Every now and then, anti-Semitism proved to be an irrelevant factor.
“Sss!”
A faint whistle, coming from my right, made me start. I abruptly turned round. It was Veronesi. Crouched behind Mazzanti’s shoulders, he was signaling to me with his thin, incredibly nicotine-stained forefinger, to turn round and look in front of me. What was I doing? he seemed to be asking, half amused, half worried. Did I not know where I happened to be, mad idiot that I was?
I obeyed. In the absolute silence, barely broken by a ripple of laughter, the whole class had turned their faces in my direction. Even Guzzo, the teacher, seated up at the front, was staring at me with a grin.
“At last,” he sighed.
I stood up.
“And your name is?”
I stammered out my surname.
Guzzo was famous for his nastiness, a nastiness bordering on sadism. About fifty years old, tall, Herculean, with big, blazing, greenish reptilian eyes beneath an enormous Wagnerian forehead, and two long grey sideburns which grew halfway down his bony cheeks, he was deemed a kind of genius at the Guarini School (it was he who had composed
the epigraph for the fallen of the First World War so conspicuously emblazoned on the entrance corridor: “Mors domuit corpora—Vicit mortem virtus ”).† He wasn’t enrolled in the Fascist party and because of this, and only because of this, everybody said, he hadn’t been granted the university chair which various of his philological writings, published in Germany, would otherwise surely have warranted.
“What?” he asked, curling a hand behind his ear, leaning forward with his broad chest against the open ledger. “Will you please raise your voice!”
He was enjoying himself, that was clear. He was toying with me.
I repeated my surname.
He brusquely sat up, and carefully checked the ledger.
“Good,” he concluded, while he made a mysterious pen stroke in it.
“Now, will you tell me a little about yourself?” he went on, leaning back in his chair again.
“About me?”
“Indeed. About you. To which part of the fifth form did you belong, A or B?
“B.”
He made a wry face. “Ah, to B. Good. And how have you got here? With one flying jump or—forgive my poor memory—are you trying a second time?”
“I have to retake math in October.”
“And only math?”
I nodded.
“Are you sure you don’t have to ‘retake’—ugly but serviceable word—any other subjects? Latin or Greek, for example?”
I shook my head.
“Are you quite sure?” he insisted with feline meekness.
I denied it again.
“Well then, my good fellow, pay attention. I wouldn’t want for you to have to retake Latin and Greek as well as math this summer . . . quod Deus avertat . . . three subjects . . . you do catch my drift, don’t you?”
He asked me how I had done in the ginnasio, and if I had ever been held back a year. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking around as though he thought me untrustworthy and was soliciting testimony from whoever was willing to supply it.