by André Aciman
“All of Orlando furioso ?” I exclaimed.
“The whole lot,” he replied drily.
But there was one question I was burning to ask him, and which I only managed to do, in the doorway, just as I was leaving.
“Have you made friends with anyone?”
To which he replied with evident satisfaction that yes, of course—he had got to know a Venetian boy whom he liked a lot, and they studied together. He was called Alverà, Leonardo Alverà—his father was a count!—a good guy and “also” good at Italian, Latin and Greek, “but” especially good at math and geometry, subjects, that was for sure, in which no one could compete with him. If every now and then I would dash off a poem, a short story, he, with the same ease, just for his own pleasure, solved the most complex equations. What a phenomenon! With a brain like that, who could tell what he’d achieve as an adult—become a scientist, an inventor, in short “a Marconi” . . .
I can’t be sure if what I’m about to tell you took place on the eighth of January, as we went back to school after Epiphany. It’s likely that it did. In any case, one early morning, a half-hour before the bell rang, I’d gone into the Gesù Church where I’d never before set foot—whenever he was confronted with a tough bit of classwork or an important oral exam Otello went there, as I put it to myself, to “propitiate the gods,” but I had only accompanied him as far as the threshold and no farther.
The church seemed empty. I had slowly walked up the right aisle, gazing up and around like a tourist, but the sunlight which shone through the large upper windows stopped me from seeing the large baroque canvases hung above the altar clearly. Having reached the transept, immersed like the rest in semi-darkness, I’d crossed to the left aisle, which was flooded with light. And there my attention was suddenly drawn to a strange gathering of motionless and silent figures, huddled beside the second of the smaller entrances.
Who were they? As I came to realize as soon as I’d come close enough, they were not living people but life sized carved statues of painted wood. They were, as it turned out, the famous Pianzùn d’la Rosa to which as a child I’d been taken many times (though not here at the Gesù, but at the della Rosa Church of Via Armari) by my Aunt Malvina, the only Catholic aunt that I had. Once again, I looked at the ghastly scene: the wretched, bruised body of the dead Christ, stretched out on the bare ground, and around him, petrified in mute attitudes, in soundless grimaces, in endless grief, never to be released in words, were gathered his relatives and friends: the Madonna, Saint John, Joseph of Arimathea, Simon, Mary Magdalene, and two pious women. Looking again at this scene, I remembered Aunt Malvina, who never managed to restrain her tears at this same spectacle. She would draw her black spinsterish shawl across her eyes, then kneel down, without, of course, daring to make her little unbaptized nephew kneel beside her.
Finally, I roused myself, looking around before leaving.
I spotted Carlo Cattolica down there, kneeling composedly in a pew off the central nave.
My initial impulse was to leave him undisturbed, and make off without being seen. Yet, instead, with my heart beating hard, I went down the left aisle on tiptoe till I came level with him.
He was praying with his satchel of books beside him, his pure, beautiful forehead leaning on his clasped hands, and proffering to my observing gaze the same finely chiselled, indecipherable profile that I would notice every day at school. Why weren’t we friends? I wondered, tormented. Why couldn’t we become friends? Perhaps he didn’t respect me? No, it couldn’t be that: even if they were hard-working and bright, Boldini and Grassi certainly weren’t better than me. Because of religion, then? No, it wasn’t to do with that either. Our different religions had never cropped up between me and Otello. On the contrary, if anything, at the Fortis’, even if they were all extremely pious and militantly active in Catholic organizations—the lawyer Forti belonged to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, and Giuseppe had also joined, two years ago—no one had ever made me feel it mattered that I was Jewish. And Cattolica’s parents weren’t known to be especially churchy. So why was it? Why?
Cattolica had got to his feet, made the sign of the cross and then seen me.
“Oh! What are you doing here?” he asked in lowered tones as soon as he had come over to me.
I’d signaled with my thumb.
“I was looking at the Pianzùn d’la Rosa.”
“Didn’t you know it?”
Only too well—I explained—having seen it on many occasions in the della Rosa Church as a child. And as we walked toward the statues I held forth about my Aunt Malvina and her ruling passion—visiting all the churches of Ferrara.
This information seemed to interest him. He wanted to know who this aunt was. Was she by any chance my mother’s sister?
“No, my grandmother’s,” I replied. “My mother’s mother. She was called Marchi.”
Meanwhile, we’d walked out into the churchyard. It was a few minutes before nine, and both the churchyard and Via Borgoleoni, especially in front of the Guarini School, were already crowded with youngsters. We were leaning against the red facade of the Gesù Church. And as none of our school companions seemed to have noticed us, we’d continued our conversation. For the first time. The event moved me, made me garrulous, and stirred in me a need for friendship.
We began to talk in general about religion, but then he asked me if it was true that we “Israelites” didn’t believe in the Madonna, if it was true that, according to us, Jesus Christ was not the son of God, if we were still expecting the Messiah, if in church we wore caps, and so on. And I replied to all of this, point by point, in a more than affable manner, suddenly feeling that his general, somewhat crude, not to say rude curiosity pleased rather than offended me, and was liberating for me.
At the end, it was I who posed him a question.
“Excuse me,” I said “but you . . . I mean your family . . . have you always been Catholics?”
His lips briefly stretched in a proud smile.
“I would imagine so. Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Cattolica is the name of a town, a seaside town near Riccione . . . between Riccione and Pesaro . . . and Jews, as you know, all have the surnames of cities and towns.”
He froze.
“You’re wrong about that,” he had retorted drily, suddenly assuming a knowledgeable air. “It’s true that many Israelites bear the names of cities and towns. But not all. Many are called Levi, Cohen, Zamorani, Passigli, Limentani, Finzi, Contini, Finzi-Contini, Vitali, Algranati and so on. What relevance does that have? I could just as easily cite an infinite number of cases of people with surnames that seemed Jewish, but actually weren’t at all.”
At this point he had begun walking off, still harping on about this topic in an undertone. This let us, for once, slip through the school gates together, and then walk down the long corridor which led to our classroom, and finally to cross the room to reach our desk, each of us keeping pace with the other like the best of friends.
4.
I REMEMBER very well Luciano Pulga’s arrival on the first Monday after lessons began.
Everyone had already taken their places. Mondays would invariably begin with two hours of Guzzo, which were dedicated to class assignments, while he, “the boss,” often liked to idle by the big window at the end of the corridor till almost a quarter past nine, immersed in apparent contemplation of the field that was growing wild at the foot of the Gesù Church’s apse, when, at the doorway, instead of the gigantic form of the teacher, we saw appear the miniscule one of a blond boy, in a green pullover, grey, knee-length short trousers, and long tawny socks. Who was he? Still, as he hovered uncertainly just inside the doorway, casting around his blue eyes, the intense cold blue of mountain ice, in search of a vacant place, I was immediately repelled by his hook nose, and the stick-legged look of someone on stilts, and at the same time moved to pity by his anxiety to find a safe haven. I watched him. Seeing no one next to Giorgio Selmi—Chieregatti was absent that da
y—he first tried to seat himself in the second desk of the first row. He was blocked. That place was taken—Selmi had quickly warned him—it belonged to someone absent, but who would be back tomorrow or the day after, and would certainly make him move. At which, he instantly stood up again, and moved away. Skinny, with a thin Adam’s apple that trembled, half strangled, a little above his white shirt collar, he halted at the end of the girls’ row, at the very desk which had remained empty since the start of term, when I’d occupied it in my stab at self-exile, and began once more to look around. Once again he walked down the aisle between the second and third rows with a measured and determined step, with the fixed gaze of someone who sees a sanctuary before him. But he was sweating. Droplets of sweat made pearls along the skin above his slightly retracted upper lip. And this detail, the drops of sweat—which I had noticed in a flash as he passed by almost touching me—once again filled me with a vague sense of repulsion.
I also clearly remember what happened when Guzzo returned to the classroom. He, the teacher, subjected the new arrival to a prolonged interrogation. “Good heavens! And who might you be?” he began, “Perhaps a visiting pupil?” The other replied to the despot, “Pulga, Luciano,” displaying an easy, inveigling Italian, that of a traveling salesman, with a markedly Bolognese accent. The class obsequiously rewarded Guzzo’s quips with gusts of laughter; and after a while I came to the aid of the poor creature, guilty of having come to school with nothing more than a fountain pen, not only offering him the regulation sheet of school paper so that he could do the class work, but also, swiftly following Guzzo’s invitation, I made my way to the back row so that “Signor Pulga, Luciano” might avail himself of my dictionary.
And, finally, I remember the odd feeling I had throughout that hour and a half spent side by side with him, with Pulga, the two of us busy trying to solve the puzzle of that Greek translation. Guzzo, while making me change places—“Seeing as you’ve scored top marks by lending him your foolscap,” he’d said, “why not excel yourself by scurrying back to where you came from?”—had given instructions that the dictionary should remain on the desk, visible at all times and placed exactly in the middle to prevent either of us from copying. But Pulga copied away regardless, as and when he wanted. Taking advantage of the teacher’s rare moments of distraction, he cast hasty, greedy, sideways glances over the Schenkl, displaying such perfect technique, I thought, that it must have required years and years of practice, an extensive career. And yet, the way he copied my work with such complete confidence, with such a lack of personal judgement, only keen to perform his own work of plagiarism without error, filled me with a complex, trapped sensation, a mixture of gratification and disgust, against which from then on I found myself defenceless, more or less incapable of any proper reaction.
At the midday break I found him close beside me.
Could I come along with him to some bookshop? he asked me. At the Minghetti School in Bologna which he’d attended, they mostly used different textbooks, so now—as though his father hadn’t forked out enough in moving here!—he’d have to buy almost a whole new set again. A complete disaster. If only he’d been able to acquire them one at a time, perhaps even on credit . . .
Together we went up Via Borgoleoni in the wan January sunlight, and Pulga, meanwhile, respectfully conceding me a place on his right, kept on talking. Despite the fact that Guzzo, during the lesson, had already elicited almost everything about his family and his scholastic curriculum, he chose to repeat, for my sole benefit, that they came from Lizzano in Belvedere, a small mountain town some eighty kilometers from Bologna, where his father, a doctor, had held a practice for almost ten years; that he had gone to primary school in Lizzano, lower ginnasio in Porretta Terme, and started upper ginnasio in Bologna, traveling back and forth on the train every damned day, and finally, that his family, the four of them—father, mother and two boys, because of this unforeseen move “into the Ferrara province”—had fallen into serious difficulties. Just imagine—they didn’t even have a house to live in!
“How come?” I asked, astonished. “You don’t even have a house? So where do you sleep?”
“In the Hotel Tripoli, in that big square behind the castle.”
I knew exactly what sort of hotel the Tripoli was. Rather than a hotel, it was a third-rate restaurant, frequented at midday by farm workers and street hustlers, and in the evening by those my mother would call “women of ill repute.” The bedrooms were situated above, on the first and second floors. And the owner of the locale—small, fat with a bowler tipped back on his crown and a toothpick between his gold-filled teeth, who, in summer, in his shirt sleeves, almost permanently sat by the entrance astride a kitchen stool—rented them out mainly by the hour, keeping the keys in his own pocket.
“True, it’s not one of the finest hotels,” Pulga continued, “and by night”—he sniggered—“it seems to be busy enough. And yet, you know, it’s far from cheap. D’you want to know how much it costs a day for four people for board and lodging?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Fifty lire.”
“Is that a lot?” I asked, uncertain.
“A lot? Do the math: five times four makes twenty. That’s two thousand lire total per month. A fair sum, wouldn’t you say? If you consider that my father, as a local doctor in Coronello, earned a monthly basic salary of only a thousand lire . . . ”
I felt a wave of anxiety.
“And so how do you manage?”
“Well . . . I said a basic salary of a thousand lire. On top of that, though, there are home visits, operations, above all, operations. But even then, in the country, people would prefer to die rather than shell out! Then, take into account competition with the main hospital in Ferrara. Coronella is too close to the city. Ten kilometers is nothing.”
He suddenly stared at me with his steady, ice blue eyes.
“But your father, what does he do?”
“He’s also a doctor,” I said, embarrassed. “But he doesn’t practice.”
“He doesn’t practice?”
“No. Every now and then he pays a home visit, but for free, to friends. A couple of times a year he gets called out farther afield. For circumcisions,” I added with an effort.
He didn’t understand, and turned round to look at me. But he caught on quickly.
“Oh, I see, that’s it . . . So, I guess you live off a private income?
“I think so.”
At the Malfatti Bookshop, in Corso Roma, the textbooks he was searching for were all out of stock. They’d have to be ordered, the assistant explained, and given that the term was already far advanced, they wouldn’t be likely to arrive for a fortnight.
I was expecting this news to disturb him. But he appeared relieved, or so it seemed to me. He dried the droplets of sweat that the heat of the shop had once again formed above his lip with a small handkerchief, and left the assistant with the list of books. He’d call back in a fortnight, he said, then went ahead of me toward the exit.
He wanted to accompany me back to my house. It was nearly one o’clock. I tried to dissuade him, telling him how far away Via Scandiana was, and that if he went along with me he wouldn’t be back at the hotel before two.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he exclaimed, laughing. “The good thing about the restaurant is that you can eat when you want to.”
“You and your family don’t eat together then?”
“Yes, we do . . . at least in theory. But partly because my father returns from the country only in the evening, when he’s finished his clinic, and partly because my mother is always out looking for flats . . . in the end we just eat together at supper and that’s all. That must seem strange to you?”
He looked at me and laughed, jutting his protruding jaw sideways (a sure sign, according to my father, of a “mauvais caractère ”). It was obvious that he envied me, envied me the order, the economic security, the bourgeois stability of my family, but it was clear he felt a slight contem
pt for me as well.
Perhaps afraid that he might have given himself away, he immediately began to thank me effusively for my help over the class work. If I hadn’t been there to give him a hand—he said—who knows how he’d have been able to manage, and with teachers like Guzzo, it’s obvious, the first impression you give him has enormous importance. But on that subject, why didn’t I ask Guzzo to be transferred, so I could stay in the back row on a permanent basis, or at least until he had got hold of all the textbooks? That Cattolica, whom I shared with, had the look of a very well-behaved, well-brought-up boy. No doubt he’s clever as well, exceptionally so. And yet, it has to be said, he’s not very likeable. Isn’t he perhaps a bit stuck up? His way of behaving, of looking at people, didn’t it have a certain . . .
He interrupted himself.
“I don’t mean to offend you,” he added, scrutinizing me, “perhaps you’re good . . . very close friends?” he asked anxiously.
I avoided his gaze.
“No, not especially,” I replied.
As far as the books were concerned, I continued, he didn’t have to worry, at school I could always lend them to him. But as for moving to sit by him, I wasn’t sure I could do that. I didn’t get on that well with Cattolica, but we’d sat together now for two months, and just to drop him like that . . . all things considered, we were something of a tried and tested partnership.