by André Aciman
“But who do you do your homework with? With him?”
“No. I don’t do homework with anyone.”
We had almost arrived. We left Via Madama by Piazza Santa Maria in Vado and turned down Via Scandiana. “What was that kind of barrier down there at the end of the street?” Pulga asked me as he kept on walking, and at the same time pointed toward the mist-covered prow of the Montagnone, at which it seemed Via Scandiana came to a halt.
I stopped in front of the entrance to my house, pressed the bell, and turned round to explain to him what the Montagnone was. But he was already distracted by something else.
“Good heavens!” he exclaimed in a serious tone. “It’s a mansion!”
He stepped back to the center of the street, keeping his gaze directed upward.
“Is it all yours?”
“Yes.”
“It must have heaps of rooms!”
“Quite a few . . . Including the first and second floor, there must be something like fifty.”
“And they’re all taken just by your family?”
“Oh no. We only live in those on the second floor. There are tenants on the first floor.”
“So you and your family live in twenty or so rooms?”
“More or less.”
“But how many of you are there?”
“There are five of us. My father, my mother and us three children: that is me, my brother, Ernesto, and my sister, Fanny. Then you’d have to count the maids.”
“How many of them do you have?”
“Two . . . and then one more who works part time.”
“Twenty rooms! Imagine the cost to heat them. And the tenants?”
At that moment, the latch of the door sprang open. I raised my eyes. My mother was at the window.
“How come you’re so late?” she asked, observing Pulga. “Come on in, your father’s already sitting at the table.”
“Good day, Signora,” said Pulga, bowing slightly.
“Good day.”
“This is a classmate of mine,” I said. “Luciano Pulga.”
“Very nice to meet you,” my mother said, with a smile. “But come in quickly now if you don’t want to make your father angry.”
She withdrew from the windowsill and closed the window. And yet Pulga had still not decided to go. He approached the big double door, gently pushed one of its wings and leaned his head into the opening.
“May I come in for a second?” he asked, turning. “I’d like to have a quick look at the garden.”
He silently walked ahead of me over the threshold while taking off his sports cap. Then, without taking his eyes off the door at the end, open onto the garden, he took another few steps on tiptoe. I watched him. He walked across the huge floor of waxed green and white tiles, with those cautious steps of his, a little stiff-jointed, like a small, solitary marsh bird.
He stopped. He kept looking around with his back turned to me, and in silence.
My lips moved of their own accord. I said:
“Would you like to come back to do your homework with me today?”
5.
MY MOTHER was delighted that I’d made a new friend.
She very much liked Luciano, from that first afternoon. When she came into the study, not only did he stand up, but he even kissed her hand. The gesture won her over utterly. A short while later, in fact, returning with a pot of tea—exceptionally good tea, accompanied by toast, butter, honey and blackcurrant jam and slices of ginger cake—she sat down to join us with this little feast and her dark eyes caressed Luciano with maternal solicitude while she spoke. She had asked about him, his family, his father’s professional duties and, becoming anxious on behalf of his mother—busying herself from morning to night in search of an apartment—she offered any possible assistance to that end. Poor woman! she had sighed. Whatever she needed, she should phone her, please tell her to phone, and she would be more than happy to mobilize not only herself but all her women friends.
“How nice your friend is,” she said later at table. “Yes, he really is polite and well brought up.”
With that emphatic “he ,” she was evidently alluding to Otello Forti, whom she, being jealous, had always found too “coarse” and “sulky.” Irritated, I didn’t reply. It was true—I thought with my eyes fixed on my plate—rather than stay home, I had always preferred to go and study in Via Montebello, at the Fortis’ house. But so what? How was it Otello’s fault that ever since Roncati, the teacher at primary school in Via Bellaria, had placed us next to each other in the first desk of the central row, right in front of the teacher’s podium, I had always preferred studying round at his house? As for hand-kissing and courtly stuff, Otello was an absolute nonstarter. But he was genuine, and sincere, perhaps too sincere . . .
Signora Pulga telephoned, and my mother wasn’t slow in relating what she and that lady had talked about.
In a highly refined voice, wearied but very appealing, the lady was profuse in her thanks. She explained she had already found a house—outside Porta Reno was where it was, along the road out to Bologna, Via Coronella, that is—and so, as far as that was concerned there was no need for any kind soul to trouble herself on their behalf. But her Luciano! How could they ever forget, she and her husband, all that we had been doing to help her Luciano?
“Thank you, my deepest thanks, my dear Signora,” she concluded. “At the moment, no, as we still have to organize the furnishings, and you know how much it costs to keep things in storage, but in a fortnight my husband and I would like permission to intrude on you with another phone call. My Oswald, as a doctor, would also very much like to make the acquaintance of your husband!”
“As a doctor?” my father grumbled, giving a faint, twisted grin, but happy, you could see, as he was whenever anyone remembered the subject in which he’d qualified. “More likely, they’ll be after some money . . . ”
Dr. Pulga was not after money at all, at least not from my father. Some days later, having called round (without his wife) at our house, he immediately made his intentions clear: he had come only to get to know a “colleague” and to have a chat. He then began to talk about himself. He had studied medicine in Modena, between 1908 and 1913. In 1914 he had married. From 1915 to 1917 he had fought on the Carso and in 1918 at Montello. In 1920, “due to a shortage of funds,” he’d had to take on the practice in Lizzano in Belvedere, which, after almost ten years in the most difficult conditions, he’d decided to leave, to take up this practice in Coronella. It was obvious—he’d added—that as far as medicine was concerned Ferrara and Bologna couldn’t even be compared. But leaving aside Coronella’s proximity to Ferrara, the Ferrarese medical establishment didn’t at all seem, as it was in Bologna, to be controlled by a tight little mafia and thus hermetically sealed against any “infliltration.” He himself knew, it could be said, all of the doctors in Bologna, from old Murri to Schiassi, from Nigrisoli to Putti, from Neri to Gasbarrini. He was even a family friend of the surgeon Bartolo Nigrasoli.
Of short stature, with a red face, “cyanotic” and green rolling eyes with a hyperthyroid aspect that glinted behind small lenses, Dr. Pulga—my father declared—wasn’t someone who appealed to him. What a hideous way of talking! To claim to be a friend of this and that person in Bologna, an intimate of half the university and half of Sant’Orsola Hospital, and meanwhile to speak so ill of them, sparing nothing and no one! Bartolo Nigrisoli, for example, perhaps the finest wielder of a scalpel in Italy today, had always been an anti-Fascist. No harm in him remaining faithful to his own views. But to wish, as Dr. Pulga had had the chutzpah to wish, that he be thrown out of the Bologna “school,” where his teaching risked “corrupting” so many youths—and at the same time proclaiming himself a friend of him and his family—my word, that really was a disgrace! And to cap it all, what kind of behavior was it to pay a visit and remain sunk in an armchair from three-thirty till eight? For heaven’s sake, would you get going! If, by chance, Dr. Pulga were to call him on the phone,
we had two choices—either tell him he was out or that he was ill in bed and couldn’t move.
But Luciano? What was Luciano like?
The first impression of faint, physical repulsion had certainly remained, and daily familiarity had not erased it. Although he was clean, in both his person and his clothes, there was always something in him that perturbed me: it might have been the droplets of sweat that emerged among the blondish hairs above his upper lip at the slightest emotion, or the blackheads, scattered more or less everywhere on the waxy skin of his face, but denser around the temples and just under his nostrils, or the marked sideways movement of his jaw when he pronounced the “z,” or else, though I’m not sure, the calloused, yellowy hue that strangely covered the palms of his hands, which were thin and oversized, a bit like a hunchback’s. But for all the rest, I have to confess, that, especially in the beginning, his refugee-like humility, his total submissiveness, that of an inferior under protection, gave me an almost inebriated sense of satisfaction. In essence, my relations with Otello had never been so easy. He accepted my superiority, but made me pay for it in countless ways: with his continual muttering, with his mulish stubbornness—if, for instance, he came to my house, and that happened rarely enough, he’d always do so sighing with ill grace. And here we had a fellow of a very different stripe, for whom my house (he even told me so that very first day when I took him on a room-by-room tour of the apartment) was the most beautiful, welcoming and comfortable place he’d ever seen in his life, my mother the nicest and kindest mother of all, and myself a kind of prodigy of cleverness and brilliance, with regards to homework, an oracle before whom he could only listen in silence and awe. Although he was neither stupid nor inept—for in the question-and-answer sessions to which he was subjected for a whole month by all the teachers, from Guzzo to Krauss, from Bianchi to Razzetti, and “that one” who taught history and philosophy, he had always defended himself tooth and nail (and, however reluctantly, even Mazzanti had been unable to award him a lower mark than five)—he left me free to unravel the knotty passages, dictate aloud whatever I decided was right, and when I’d finished, limiting himself—while he was still writing it down in his notebook in his big, neat, slightly angular, feminine hand—to exclamations of applause, such as “Bravo!” “What a knockout!” “I’ve never seen anyone translate Greek so well!” “Lucky sod!” How relaxing, I would say to myself, what an easy life it is for Luciano Pulga! What a difference between him, who never needed to contribute (in practice, it was I alone who translated, so that if my mother had approached on tiptoe to eavesdrop behind the door—nor was it impossible that she did so, as I had heard the parquet creak in the next room more than once—she would have heard only one voice holding forth, mine), what a difference between him and Otello, who, whenever he opened his mouth, it was to play the contrarian or devil’s advocate! But leaving Otello aside, if I’d managed, as at a certain point I was hoping to, to enter and be part of Cattolica’s circle, imagine what a struggle I’d have had! The rivalry that divided us at school, sharpened by the irremovable presence of his two cronies, Boldini and Grassi, would certainly have continued round at his place. At Cattolica’s house, yes: as for where we’d go to study, there would have been no discussion. Either his place or solitude, take it or leave it . . .
Luciano would arrive every afternoon around four o’clock, and wouldn’t leave before seven-thirty or eight. Yet it’s not as if we were always working. Besides the half hour for tea, every now and then we’d stop to chat. This was always up to Luciano to decide, for it was he, suddenly energetic and commanding, who would impose those brief pauses which my poor, tired brain had need of, just as, later, when he considered that I was sufficiently rested and relaxed, he would spur me on to further labors.
During the intervals, he did everything to entertain me, distract me, even amuse me. He was greatly in debt to me—for the protection I’d offered him from the first day, the books that I was still lending him, the hospitality of my home, the homework that, essentially, I did for him. And he therefore—he seemed to be saying—repaid me with the modest, but perhaps not contemptible gift of his presence and with his spectator’s role of egging me on. It wasn’t much. Little enough, that was true. But of one thing I could be sure—there was nothing more he was able to give.
He was careful not to boast about anything. Very often he would declare that he was without any ambitions, happy to remain confined within the limbo of “those who are suspended between a five and a six,”‡ as, he would add with a smile, standing out in one way or another, for good or for bad, one ended up “paying the price.” It was as if he were saying, “I know I don’t count for much—no, for even less than that.” And yet the way he talked to me about school, for example, putting Mazzanti’s fairness in doubt—he was sure that between me and Cattolica, he shamelessly favored Cattolica—or making me aware that down there, from the back row—a lowly position, to be sure, yet not without some advantages—he was afforded a much clearer and more objective vision of the whole class than I could have, involved as I was in the struggle, the competition, in the glorious but also petty daily slog of coming out on top: in every phrase of his I could perceive his determination to be useful to me, even indispensable.
Confident that it would please me, he never missed an opportunity to speak ill of Cattolica.
In his view, Cattolica was nothing but a conceited bighead. Leaving aside the present company, how could I really compare the intelligence of Boldini with Cattolica’s, or even that of Giorgio Selmi? The fact was that Boldini didn’t want to come out on top—even being an underdog was a vocation!—and even less than that would do for Selmi, who aspired to nothing more than an average of seven. A plodder like Chiereghatti, though better organized and cannier—that was all Cattolica basically was! And, in fact, Guzzo, who was by no means stupid, and didn’t let himself be dazzled, like Krauss and Razzetti, by mere feats of memory, when he sought out an answer a little out of the ordinary, usually left Cattolica well alone, and knew who to turn to . . . True, I wasn’t especially well disposed to scientific subjects, or to be more precise I only applied myself in subjects I liked—Italian, Latin, Greek etc. But it would just have needed a little effort on my part—only last year in the math retake exam hadn’t I passed with a good eight?—and he was willing to bet that even in math, in physics and in natural sciences that “Signor” Cattolica would be made to bite the dust.
“No, really, I don’t think so.” I weakly warded off the compliment. “I’ve never been any good at math.”
“You’ve never been any good at it because you’ve never wanted to be.”
“Maybe. But isn’t that the same thing in the end?”
“It isn’t the same thing. Being able is one thing, wanting to is another.”
“In my opinion, it’s a question of the grey matter, of the brain’s development just not being adapted to it.”
When I threw out that phrase with a smile, Luciano jumped up in protest. For me, of all people, to argue such a thing!
The way he looked at me, serious, intense, and at the same time respectful, I understood that he was awaiting my permission to remind me of the mathematical genius of my race—my father too, with an excellent head for figures, was convinced that we Jews were the best mathematicians in the world, attributing my scarce aptitude seriously enough to the peasant blood of my grandmother Maria. I pretended not to understand and let the topic drop.
But he was right, and bit by bit he was becoming indispensable to me. With that in mind, I remember one afternoon toward the end of February when, because of the snow, he was late for our meeting.
Unexpectedly, the snow had begun to fall in the morning, around nine thirty. How beautiful and moving it was to see from inside the classroom, the small silent flakes as they slowly fell against the blackish background of the Church of Gesù, and then, on leaving, to find Via Borgoleoni entirely mantled in white. It caused the usual festivities. At the school gates, a big snowb
all fight broke out, during which Luciano and I had utterly lost sight of each other, but it didn’t matter, as it was understood that at four o’clock we would meet up as usual.
After lunch, rather than abating, the snowfall became heavier. At five, oddly uneasy, I was already wondering if Luciano would have been able to make his way on foot from the remote district of Foro Boario as far as Via Scandiana. Perhaps today he might not manage it—I said to myself, looking out the window. Perhaps it would be better if I started my studies alone.
I sat down at the desk with my notebook and with the textbook open before me, but I couldn’t concentrate. The Pulgas still needed to install a telephone at their house. Yet if Luciano had really meant not to come, it was reasonable to suppose he could all the same have found some way of warning me, bothering to walk to the chemist’s fifty meters away to phone me. Whenever there was any urgent need, the Pulgas made use of that facility. He had told me so himself.
At a quarter past five, I stood up again, and went to the window once more. Outside it was already dark. And if I were to go to Luciano’s house? Besides, that would only be fair.
I opened the window. I leaned out, breathed the air and looked down. The snow continued falling, but more feebly now, reduced to a kind of dust dancing weightlessly around the yellowish streetlamps. Down in the street an immaculate blanket of snow, compact and even, had covered and softened every protuberance. Neither the cobbles nor the curbs could be distinguished anymore.
And then, down there, while my heart was beating madly, beating with a joy mixed as ever with its opposite, I suddenly made out Luciano himself, as he swiftly slipped inside the gate at that very moment.