The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  10.

  ALTHOUGH DAZZLED—IT wasn’t an electric light, as I’d supposed, but the sun, close to setting, which blazed obliquely into the room—I entered, looking about with amazement.

  It was big, a kind of reception room, with a large horizontal window which took up most of the wall facing west, and with a second, smaller window looking out toward Via Cavour, the Aqueduct and the Spianata fields. But straightaway, as soon as I’d come in, behind the backlit figures of Boldini and Grassi, I became aware of two pinewood bookcases, one opposite the other, full of beautiful leather-bound volumes; in the center, a dark leather sofa facing a low table; two armchairs upholstered in the same material; the impeccably waxed parquet floor almost entirely hidden by carpets; the bed beside the door which sported a fleecy, carefully folded woolen cover at its foot; and a graceful bedside table level with the top of the headboard. I was struck, in short, by the luxurious appearance of the room, undoubtedly the finest in the house, and beside which, even my study, so admired and praised by Luciano, looked like a cubbyhole. All things considered, he hadn’t greatly exaggerated, Cattolica—I thought—when he’d boasted of that table, proclaiming that almost the whole upper school could have sat around it, “girls included!” Yet again, guessing that behind the ease of the spoiled little rich boy, lay the obsession of both his parents determined to make any sacrifice so that he, the adored only son, might scale the highest and brightest reaches of his career and of life—but mainly the obsession of his mother, the mathematics teacher, with whom, some mornings, I’d seen him arm in arm, a tall, pale, thin woman, with glances that darted from cavernous eye sockets, and capable, by all accounts, of giving a dozen or so detentions a day; yet again, I was gripped by that obscure dislike mixed with envy which, from the very start, I’d felt for the classmate with whom I shared a desk.

  I exchanged greetings with Boldini and Grassi, and went to sit at the far end of the table. In front of me was Boldini’s head, half hidden by a big lamp that wore a green silk shade, Grassi on the left and, to the right, Cattolica, who was also now seated and holding forth. I felt uneasy, full not only of apprehension about Luciano’s arrival which I believed to be imminent, but also of suspicion and rancor. Yet Cattolica seemed perfectly calm. He chatted away volubly, entertaining the guest, the outsider. Unfortunately, he couldn’t offer me anything to eat or drink—he said, his black eyes shining and excited—as there was no one but us in the house and his mother wouldn’t be back before nine . . . Then he came straight to the heart of the matter. Given that he had a distaste—it had never been his habit, his “style” to employ “devious means”—he had to remind me that in the last few days he’d tried his best to open my eyes. And I? How had I rewarded his efforts? Not only had I listened with obvious reluctance, but I’d behaved toward him as if he, not Pulga, had been the real villain. This had gone on too long. Now I’d finally understood and, thank God, believed in his good faith. But ask either him, pointing to Boldini, or him, pointing at Grassi: Was it or was it not true, that Pulga, the few times he’d come over to study with them—it had happened a month ago during the nearly two weeks that I’d been ill—had badmouthed me continuously and in the most disgusting way? He was seated just there, where I was, copying their texts with impunity and seizing upon any chance he had to attack me. And he went for me, unprompted, it had to be said, without anyone, ever, even dreaming of encouraging him, so much so that on one occasion he couldn’t resist asking Pulga if I’d done something to hurt him. To which the bastard had replied, No, not a chance, I’d done nothing to him, but that shouldn’t in any way prevent him judging me with objectivity—objectivity, didn’t I see?—for what I was and for my true worth.

  I listened. When Cattolica, feverishly pointing his bony finger, prompted me to ask Boldini and Grassi, I obeyed. I detached my gaze from him and turned it first on one and then the other. To Cattolica’s question—“Was it or wasn’t it true?” the former had replied, nodding, with a serious air, while staring at his hands on the table. As for the latter, bent and almost flat against the exercise book in which he was sketching a caricature, he seemed not even to have heard. But his silence meant the same thing: that he agreed, that the facts were just as Cattolica had described them. Both of them were very different—I thought—from how I’d always seen them at school. Boldini’s hair wasn’t blond, but reddish. And only now that I saw his hands clenched together, almost making a single enormous fist, was the strength that Cattolica had ascribed to him apparent to me. And Grassi? Grassi, too, was different. Cattolica had compared him to Silvio Pellico. He was right. Utterly absorbed in his sketch, every now and then he stuck out the tip of his tongue, leaving it there to linger for a few moments, a grey bud at the corner of his mouth. He was right. The comparison was spot on.

  I suddenly got up, walked to the window and pressed my forehead against the glass. Having disappeared briefly behind the sugar refinery opposite the station, the sun was no longer in my eyes and the vista, filled with orchards and gardens which stretched from the Cattolicas’ house to the city walls, and then beyond to the endless plain, immediately made me want to be there, with those boys chasing after a ball on the broad walkway on top of the walls, or else there on that fast train which, with its windows lowered, was at that very moment slowly leaving the station, or else there, in the far distance, going along the lovely asphalted street of Pontelagoscuro on that little yellow tram, tiny as a tin can, which was perilously careening toward the black horizontal line made by the banks of the Po. By now it must have begun to cool down outside. If not today, tomorrow, at this very hour, I would take off on my bike and go to see the Po. The Po in full flood. And alone at last. After having exposed Luciano. After having finished with him and with all the others. Alone forever.

  “What a total bastard!” Cattolica repeated. “When I think that there are people like Pulga in the world, it makes my blood boil.”

  I turned round. I couldn’t wait to be done with it all.

  “But are you sure he’s coming?”

  “Definitely. Who knows how many miles that creep would be willing to trudge in a day on his little matchstick legs to sneak into other people’s houses? You know those mongrels you just have to whistle for and they immediately come running and wagging their tails? Pulga’s just like that, a real suck-up. Desperate to sneak about and stick his nose in, you know what I mean? And it’s not really as if he does it out of need. It’s just a question of character. Maybe because I’m not a bastard or a suck-up, and I can’t bear that combination, it makes my skin crawl. I’m only at ease in my own home, while, on the contrary, there are people in the world who can never stay put in their own houses.”

  “What time did you tell him to come?”

  He checked his elegant Eberhard chrome-metal wristwatch and twisted his lips.

  “There’s time. I told him, and repeated it, not to come before seven o’clock, and since he does as he’s told, we still have a good twenty-five minutes to arrange things.”

  Although he had spoken of his “plan to make him sing,” I don’t know why, but I was sure he had prepared a kind of trial: with himself playing the role of judge and Boldini and Grassi together as assistant judges, with Luciano and me battling it out with words under the scrutiny of the court. I had basically imagined a direct confrontation, and in the last hours it had been this prospect that gradually wrung my stomach in an ever more oppressive grip. It was therefore a relief to learn from Cattolica that his famous scheme did not require my presence in the room at all, and so no “scene” was planned. When Luciano arrived, I would simply pass through to the adjacent bedroom—and, so saying, Cattolica pointed to the door I’d noticed behind Boldini’s back—and from there with the greatest of ease I could hear everything that creature would undoubtedly, once again, spew forth about me. In short, all I had to do was listen. But in the meantime, why not go through right now for a moment, into the other room—it was his parents’ bedroom—taking care to leave the door a f
raction ajar? Only in that way could I check beforehand how well I’d be able to hear.

  Not to have to see Luciano, to avoid looking at his face, while Cattolica made him talk! Overcome by a sudden sense of euphoria I moved away from the window and, brushing past Boldini’s back, entered the adjoining room.

  Inside was very dark, or at least so it seemed to me: the thick darkness of a cellar.

  I stationed myself at the door, my eyes at the crack, and said blithely:

  “Go on, say something!”

  “I’m telling you, Gianni,” Cattolica began in a relaxed manner, turning to Boldini, “in my opinion it’s not true that . . . ”

  “I can see that,” Boldini replied, “yes, I can see that . . .”

  “Can you hear us OK?” asked Cattolica, raising his voice.

  “Perfectly!” I shouted out. “I can hear every word.”

  I returned to the study.

  I sat down again, but now we didn’t seem to know what else to say. Grassi had begun sketching again. Boldini was looking out the window, his attention drawn, it seemed, to the little fluttering black tatters of the bats that flitted so close to the windows they looked as if they’d smash themselves against them.

  Dusk was drawing on. Even Cattolica stopped talking. I saw him glance at his watch again.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Still another ten minutes to go.”

  He shook his head, as though unhappy about something. I asked if anything was wrong, and he denied it. I pressed him further and he admitted that yes, there was something wrong.

  “Perhaps we’ve been making a mistake all along,” he said.

  Staring at me, he then added, that should it suit me, having fully heard all of Pulga’s spiel, if I was to come out of my hiding place and give him a “flurry of slaps,” right where he was sitting, I should feel utterly free to do so. None of them would lift a finger to stop me. Far from it.

  “What?” I exclaimed. “D’you mean here?”

  “Why not? Postpone the punishment and the guilt is half forgiven. Let’s suppose tomorrow morning at school you take him aside and start saying to him, ‘D’you know, Luciano . . .’ ”—and he began speaking, in a nasal, saccharine tone as if that was the way Luciano and I habitually spoke to each other—“ ‘D’you know, Luciano, yesterday evening I was there at Cattolica’s too, hidden behind a door?’ So, you start telling him like that, that the game’s up and he’s been caught red handed. Sly little cheat that he is, you can be sure that Pulga will manage to convince you there was nothing amiss, that he didn’t mean anything by it, that you hadn’t understood at all, and so on. He’d even be capable of losing his temper, arguing that these things shouldn’t ever be done, that a friend would never play a dirty trick like that, and that he had been aware of everything immediately anyway, had spoken a little ill of you deliberately, to pay you back . . . I can just see you both,” he scoffed. “And everything will vanish like a soap bubble.”

  He was right. I too could see myself and Luciano playing this out, and a little later, Luciano would be round at my house to do his homework once again. As though nothing had happened. As though nothing at all had changed.

  “Alright, then,” I said uncertainly, looking around me, “but how could it be done here?”

  Cattolica leaped to his feet. “I’ll prepare the ring for you.”

  On his own, in a flash, he dragged the leather sofa and the little table under the window, so they stood against one of the two bookcases, on the other side of the armchairs, then he rolled up the carpet that was in the center of the room and hid it under the bed.

  “There we are,” he said, turning toward us, all red in the face from his exertions.

  From the far side of the table Boldini had raised his blue eyes toward me, of the same icy blue that Luciano’s had. He was staring me straight in the face. He tightened his lips, as if fighting against an impulse of shyness, and then said in a serious voice:

  “You’re not scared, are you?”

  I burst out laughing.

  But he didn’t seem very convinced. He asked me how much I weighed. Then he wanted to know how heavy I thought Luciano was. And without waiting for my reply, he concluded that in his opinion a single “slap,” well delivered, would be enough “to knock him down.”

  He got up, walked behind Grassi, came over to squeeze the muscles of my arms—Cattolica, silent for once, merely nodded—and meanwhile proceeded to reassure me about the outcome of the approaching contest and to advise me how I ought to hit him. I should follow a left to his belly, with the right, a “haymaker,” to the jaw.

  “Let me show you.”

  I followed him into the middle of the room, the center of the “ring.” And we were still there, facing each other, intent on practicing the “move” before the infantilized gaze of Cattolica and Grassi, when we heard the doorbell ring.

  11.

  A LITTLE before, for the few moments I’d been there, the bedroom of Cattolica’s parents had seemed steeped in total darkness. I was wrong. Once there again, I quickly realized that one could see more than enough.

  In the room I’d just left, they had turned on the table lamp. Seeping through the gap of the half-closed door, the light was a white band which extended sharply past my feet, across the floor of dark, hexagonal tiles identical to those on the ground floor, without encountering a single object. The very faint light—that of an underground crypt—which spread uniformly across the room was produced by a tiny low dim lamp beneath a holy image hung in the center of the wall to my right. It was enough to disclose the parallel shapes of two separate beds side by side, and the blackish shadow of a dressing table and a wardrobe beside the image itself—which was of a Jesus with languid blue eyes and a blond helmet of hair perfectly parted in the middle, with vermillion lips barely separated to disclose the tips of two snow-white teeth and with one alabaster, feminine hand raised limply to point at a plump red heart that hung like a monstrous fruit high on his chest.

  I was tense, alert, but calm. I focused on the image of Jesus, that extravagant red heart; and also on my own, which from the first had been beating furiously, but now had steadied itself. Besides, I was no longer there in the study, a few yards from Cattolica and Luciano, who, after having slowly climbed the stairs, were still lingering to chat in the anteroom. The bedroom where I had hidden appeared at once infinitely more secret, more remote, even more shadowy than it actually was—a speck lost in the womb of a vast space, wide as the ocean . . .

  Once the four of them were seated round the table, Luciano, I guessed, occupying the place where, till just before, I myself had sat, I wondered when and in what way they would get round to talking about me.

  They had some two hours at their disposal; and perhaps, for this reason too, apart from enjoying keeping me in suspense, Cattolica seemed unconcerned to hurry things along. Patient and sly as a cat with a mouse, he listened to his prey dispensing his fluent, typically Bolognese chatter. Pulga was speaking about trivial enough things. He too was stalling. And so?—Cattolica had the air of saying, though remaining almost entirely silent—and so? Let the little toad keep croaking, let him do his utmost to appear amusing and intriguing in exchange for the inestimable gift of being invited and accepted there. Sooner or later—from the tone of his sparse replies, of his measured interruptions to the ceaseless hum of Luciano’s voice, I understood how sure of himself Cattolica felt—get around to doing exactly what we had all, myself included, agreed to do.

  So, for a long time, for a good half-hour, Luciano spoke of things that related to me only indirectly.

  He began speaking about their homework. He asked if they’d finished it. And since Cattolica answered in the affirmative, that they had completed it just now, a moment before he’d arrived—Oh well, he sighed, lucky them! He, by contrast, hadn’t managed to get through more than a fraction: the Latin and Italian he’d done, but not any Greek yet. No, really, but thanks a lot! he had then exclaimed, allo
wing me to almost see the rapid lateral shift of his jaw—it wasn’t necessary for Cattolica to lend him his exercise book. Apart from the fact that every now and then he liked to try doing it on his own, that is, translating the ninety-eight verses of The Iliad assigned us by that “crabby” old Guzzo, he still had the whole evening after supper and tomorrow morning to finish it.

  From homework, he changed the subject to philosophy.

  Razzetti had yet to quiz him in class—he said—and so tomorrow morning, when he’d finished working on The Iliad, he certainly needed to take a look at Phaedo, as one could never be sure . . . and speaking of which, Razzetti, sure enough, philosophy wasn’t his forte, and he could only teach it by way of the usual smoke and mirrors, relying on those synopses he also resorted to in his history classes. But Plato himself, wasn’t he, anyway, every bit as dull as poor old Razzetti? And Socrates! Always pontificating with his smug, know-all teacher’s air, and yet as stupid as they come, an utter fool! Just as well that at the end—he’d skipped ahead—they’d given him that famous cup of hemlock to drink. But even leaving aside Plato and Socrates, in his modest opinion, the whole of philosophy was a load of crap.

  “What d’you mean?” objected Cattolica. “It’s not as though philosophy is religion, there’s no need for you to believe in it!”

  “Excuse my ignorance, but what is it, then?”

  Slowly, good-naturedly, indulgently, Cattolica began to expound his thoughts on philosophy. Grassi, and even Boldini, also chipped in every now and then.

  “I daresay all of you are right,” Luciano sighed at a certain point.

  All the same—he added—with what little grey matter that “after so much cranking the shank” he had left at his disposal, who knows what low marks he’d get tomorrow morning, should it occur to Razzetti to test him. He was no Cattolica, unfortunately, someone who only needed to read something once to understand it! Of little intelligence, as he knew himself to be, with only the faintest glimmer of a memory . . .