by André Aciman
“Why not try and find some work?” he asks.
“If only there were some!”—Riccardo T replies with animation. For years he’s been looking. Yet, let’s be clear, heavy labor is not his forte, never has been. To be a laborer or a porter requires muscles, good lungs and so on, and he, in that respect, sadly . . besides it’s worth saying that the Ts were once a “well off family” with a spacious flat on Via dell’Arancio. To sum up: he is keen, very keen, to work, but only under certain conditions. Oh to find a nice quiet little job, a bit of office drudgery, where you can sit at a desk!
“Quite right,” said the inspector, with a humorous look.
Given his own work, it’s not as though he’s excessively sensitive. Despite that, at this point he feels embarrassed. He takes out a packet of cigarettes and offers one to Signor T, taking another for himself. The conversation has taken a strange turn—he thinks as he lights his own and the other’s cigarette—strange and unwelcome. Whatever, he needs it to end. He needs to cut it short, to come to the point.
“Believe me, Inspector Sir, all we’re dealing with here is a joke . . . ” T starts in a low tone.
In the meantime he gives a wink, as if before judging him they should take proper account of his tortoiseshell spectacles, of the best make, of his decent enough tie, of his almost freshly laundered shirt, of his face shaven this very morning, of the biro peeking out of his jacket pocket, which attests, should there be any such need, that he’s done some studying, that he knows how to write, and even of the little fingernail on his right hand, allowed to grow long, not of course from neglect, God forbid, but for elegance and distinction. It’s true—he told himself with a sigh—the ironing of his dark suit, apparent even to himself, left quite a lot to be desired, especially the trousers. But on the other hand, what can you do about that? When one lives alone, without a woman in the house, whether wife or daughter or domestic help, and when—he grins—there’s really no sort of house at all, how is one to manage? That leaves the shoes, admittedly, shoes which unfortunately being gym shoes and therefore white, clash a bit with the suit. And yet, when the rest, all the rest, of the outfit has a more than dignified air, what do the shoes matter?
He winks again. He clenches his shapeless right hand, and shrugs his scrawny shoulders.
“You must believe me, Inspector Sir,” he repeats himself. “It was really only a joke. I boasted that I had the Gold Medal just to impress them. They’d made fun of me because of the shoes, and so I . . . But I wasn’t being serious . . . I had no desire at all to . . . ”
He doesn’t go on: it would obviously be imprudent.
Yet, if instead of a member of the police force, he’d had an entirely different kind of person in front of him (someone who’s a writer, for example), there’s no way that he’d have stopped himself there.
One can easily, he’d say—and there’d be nothing for me to do but nod, and encourage him with a series of minimal gestures to get it all off his chest—one can easily reach seventy-eight years of age and, in all that time, not have managed to come by the most modest of diplomas. One can easily be reduced, for smokes, to scraping up fag-ends; for food, to frequenting certain friars always willing to serve some soup; for sleep, to passing the nights wherever you happen to be, at the station, the post office or in the smaller parks. But for all that there’s no reason why, when you meet your fellow citizens, you should entirely stop being able to hold your head up. Even someone such as him surely had the right to a minimum of self-respect!
That is what Signor T would say if he should find himself here, in this room, seated at the other side of my desk.
But would that be all? At this point would he really have spilled the beans, have exhausted all he had to say?
We are seated opposite each other, and for some moments have been staring into each other’s eyes.
“But do me a favor!” Signor T suddenly blurts out, pointing at me with his skeletal, nicotine-stained finger. “If you’d happened to find yourself in my situation, Professor, that evening of the gym shoes, don’t you think you too might have thought up some little pretence? And wouldn’t you say it, be honest, every time you needed to, including . . . including when you write . . . when”—and here he grins—“when you tell your stories? And then, why should you of all people, author of The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles and of Behind the Door, treat a poor old fellow like me with such grudging sympathy?”
On that unfortunate evening—he proceeds with a suddenly contrite air—the pretence he’d resorted to was a bit on the strong side, it’s true, a fabrication that, well, he might have thought better of . . . also out of respect for the many that . . . Undoubtedly.
Yet there are so many gold medals—he adds, once again with the sneer of a fraternal washed-up, old wreck—so very many of them knocking about, with all the wars, from Libya on, that our Italy has thrown itself into! One medal more or less, let’s be fair, what difference does it make?
* See footnote on p. 41.
Down There, at the End of the Corridor
“L IDA Mantovani ”* had an extremely toilsome gestation. I drafted it in 1937, as a twenty-one-year old, but in the following years I refashioned it no less than four times: in 1939, in 1948, in 1953 and finally in 1955. This was the work on which I have expended my lengthiest labors. Almost twenty years.
One could fairly ask how on earth I could spend not much less than a quarter of a century in putting together a small work of hardly forty pages. What can I say? Certainly, from the beginning I have always had the greatest difficulty, I wouldn’t say in realizing, as Cézanne uses the term, but simply in writing. No, unfortunately, the famous “gift” is something I’ve never possessed. Even now, writing, I stumble over every word, in the middle of every phrase I risk losing my way. I make, cross out, remake, cross out again. Ad infinitum. It’s also worth taking account of another circumstance.
A third time, during the winter of 1947 to 1948, I was spurred on to rework “Deborah’s Story” (as the short story was initially called: the actual title was not to be arrived at before another seven years had passed, until, as I’ve said, 1955), above all by Marguerite Caetani di Bassiano, the part American, part French and part Italian woman, already the animating spirit of the famous Commerce in Paris entre les deux guerres, who, having also settled in Rome, had then begun to consider founding a new international review.† Strange, isn’t it? And yet it happened exactly like this. If, in the first issue of Botteghe Oscure, which came out in the spring of 1948, I appeared as a story writer (between 1942 and 1947, the years in which I’d moved from Ferrara to Rome, I had almost exclusively composed poems) it was not in obedience to some inescapable creative calling, so much as in response to an expectation, both affectionate and imperious, of a close friend. It’s the unalloyed truth. And it’s also true that every poem of mine, every story short or long, every novel, even every essay and, further, every passing article I ever wrote was always born, some more, some less, as “Lida Mantovani” was: painfully and with effort, and in large part by chance.
Even “The Stroll before Dinner” cost me an enormous struggle. I began to write it toward the end of 1948, and I worked over it for more than two years.
I had scribbled down a page, the opening one, then came to a halt. I felt I had in hand a strong opening, infinitely rich in promise and suggestion. But where on earth this tortuous little lane I’d taken would lead me I had no idea.
For some months the first page lay there where I’d left it. Fate disposed, though, that one fine day I showed it to Mario Soldati, with whom since the end of 1945 I’d become friends. This time it was he who spurred me on. Why not try taking it further?—he asked me. In his view the story, as an idea, was already well formed. It only needed to be realized, to be set on its feet. And to finish it I only had to do one thing: to stop (but not for ever, don’t worry, just for a while!) gadding around Rome on my bicycle. Had I perhaps forgotten the advice given by the aged Flaubert to the young Maupassant:
“Less whoring and less rowing”? Well then, his advice to me was limited to less cycling and more desk. The bicycle might be good for writing poetry. One pedals, thinks of a verse, stops to write it down, and sets off again. But for a writer of stories, novellas, novels—obliged to draw out all that is within, but slowly—the bicycle presented a very serious and damaging risk. According to the phrase often used by Emilio Cecchi, I should: “Stop still for five minutes.” The rest would happen by itself . . .
It wasn’t at Rome, however, but rather at Naples, where I’d moved in the autumn of 1949 (having been appointed as a teacher at the local naval institute), and where ironically I had no bicycle at my disposal, that I managed to set about the story with the required dedication.
What a struggle, though, what a painful battle! After having spent the morning at school, and then, shut up in my little pensione room, having passed the whole afternoon in an attempt to write five or six lines, I would go out in the evening in search of a pizza, and make my way along the sidewalk of Via Chiatamone reeling like a drunkard. Proud of the new commitment I was putting into the work, but deeply disappointed by the results, I wondered what on earth I could expect of the future. Oh well, let’s wait and see—I said to myself. In some manner the draft proceeded: I had put together various chapters. But for how long would I have to stumble on in this way, without knowing where I was going to end up? No, no. Even if one day or another it happened that I should finally bring “The Stroll before Dinner” to completion, I would never become a novelist. I would never become a Soldati, a Moravia, a Pratolini—the latter, who then lived in Naples, I saw often enough, and whenever I went to pay him a visit, in the house he occupied just below the Vomero district, he would read me long passages from his unpublished novel—all of them, lucky fellows, capable of amassing hundreds and hundreds of pages. But on the other hand—I would also say to myself, with a heart that suddenly filled again with blind pride and hope—wasn’t this the very proof of my real difference? Even if, for some time, I hadn’t been inclined to write any poems, wasn’t I in the end a poet?
Before I completed “The Stroll” many more months would have to pass: the whole of 1950, part of 1951; and the culmination, as would prove to be the case on not a few other occasions, came upon me suddenly and unexpectedly. One morning, at school, I was giving a lesson. Abruptly, the classroom door half opened. It was the janitor with a telegram. What a joy it was to read! Marguerite Caetani had written it. She said that she liked “The Stroll,” and intended to publish it in the next issue of the review.
The composition of “A Memorial Tablet on Via Mazzini” was always arduous, but set beside that of “The Stroll” it was a breeze. The struggle I’d had with “The Stroll” had been important, even decisive. It had helped me understand a great many things. I had understood, for example, that Dr. Elia Corcos, and that poor thing Gemma Brondi, his wife, were not the only characters of significance in the story. A relevant character, and by no means a minor one in the story, was also Ferrara, the city within whose bounds the events of those lives unfolded: this Ferrara, besides, rather than stepping forward to occupy the front of the stage, to show itself boldly, remained in a subordinate position behind, as a backdrop. I had, moreover, understood that a story, in order to achieve any real and poetic significance, undoubtedly had to capture the attention of the reader, but must know how to be at the same time play, pure play, an abstract geometry of volumes and spaces. “The Stroll” told the stories of Elia Corcos, Gemma Brondi, their respective and counterposed clans, Ferrara and so on. Simultaneously, however, it narrated something else: and that was the utterly private and seemingly even futile and gratuitous satisfaction derived from it by me, the writer, in creating a kind of narration which gave a sense, precisely through and by means of its structure, of an exceptionally long cinematic tracking shot. What, in fact, was “The Stroll,” considered under the exclusive profile of its form, if not the mobile unravelling of an image, at first confused, barely legible, which then, with extreme slowness, almost with reluctance, was brought into focus? The past is not dead—the very structure of the story asserted—it never dies. Although it moves further away: at every passing moment. To recover the past is thus possible. What’s required, however, if one really has the desire to recover it, is to travel down a kind of corridor which grows longer at every instant. Down there at the very end of the corridor—at the sunlit point where its blackened walls converge—is life, vivid and throbbing as it once was when it first took form. Eternal, then? Yes, eternal. And even if it’s ever further away, ever more fugitive, it remains all the more open to new possession.
Even in “A Memorial Tablet on Via Mazzini” an absolute protagonist, another monstre sacré, stood out in high relief. In place of Elia Corcos, the Jewish Ferrarese doctor, revered for decades, in charge of the health of the whole town, there was Geo Josz, the Jewish Ferrarese boy, the city’s sole survivor of the hell of the Nazi extermination camps. But here the city, Ferrara, was decidedly given a role of equal importance; although still a little mythical, not fully sounded out and disclosed, as it had appeared in “The Stroll.” At the front of the stage, contending with the protagonist, sharing the footlights with him, there was now also the city itself. As far as the structure of the story went, this time I had considered it opportune to stress the geometry. While writing, I never ceased to picture a couple of spheres of equal size, hung in the air at the same height, and revolving slowly around their respective axes. The two spheres were identical: in volume, in their slow synchronic motions, in everything. Except that one turned in one, the other in a contrary direction. Two universes, close but separate. A harmony between them would never be possible.
“The Last Years of Clelia Trotti” and “A Night in ’43” I wrote between 1953 and 1955, all considered, with far less of a struggle.
In terms of the number of characters and the context in which they are gathered together, both stories in some way repeat those in “A Memorial Tablet.” On one side, the protagonist (in “The Last Years,” Clelia Trotti, the old Socialist teacher who has ended up in a shabby and cruel era; in “A Night” the chemist Barilari, Pino Barilari, he too, like Geo Josz, sole surviving witness to a massacre); and, on the other, as reliable deuteragonist, the usual seething human anthill, the usual hydra with thousands upon thousands of faces of the collective conscience or unconscious. Each story always has its own structure. That of “The Last Years” had nothing to do with the converging lines of “The Stroll,” or of the revolving spheres of “A Memorial Tablet.” What it had were four rigid vertical elements of an opaque, translucent material, closer to paper or cloth than to stone or metal: extensive and flat, all these four elements were divided but parallel. Even if not exactly reminiscent of the sphere, however, the structure of “A Night” was once again inspired by the figure of the circle. I had imagined many circles: one inside the other. The last and smallest, so tiny as to coincide with its own absolute central point, was the prison cell, the hermit’s cell, the tomb, from the window of which, in the depths of a December night, Pino Barilari, the paralysed chemist, had himself seen in a blinding flash “ce que l’homme a cru voir.”
Before I gathered them together in the volume entitled Five Stories of Ferrara—as I did in 1956—the stories were published one after the other in reviews.
Contrary to all my expectations, “The Last Years of Clelia Trotti” didn’t appeal to Marguerite Caetani. She had found it inferior to the preceeding stories—“a bit boring.” It’s true that in the meantime I had been invited by Roberto Longhi, my art history teacher and lifelong friend, to help edit Paragone, a magazine that, in the end, made me feel just as welcome. But it was only the unexpected, slightly mysterious rejection of Marguerite which induced me to seek hospitality elsewhere.
However, no sooner had I finished the draft of “A Night in ’43,” than I began to feel I had exhausted a seam. By this stage, already, Ferrara was there. Through the act of caressing and exploring eve
ry part of her, it seemed to me that I’d succeeded in setting her upright, in gradually making her concrete, actual or, to put it another way, believable. It was some achievement, I thought. But not that big a deal. And in any case, not enough.
The full critical awareness of what I would have to do so that my five Ferrarese stories should find their successor (they’d better find it!—I had so many other things to tell, to say. . . ) only arrived a year and a half later, when I began to work on The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles. Only then, after having finished writing the third chapter of that tale, which is not a short story, but a novel in its own right, no matter that it’s short and Ferrarese, my ideas suddenly became clear: at the point at which I found myself, Ferrara, the little segregated universe I had invented, would no longer be able to reveal to me anything substantially new. If I wanted the place to come back to tell me something else, I would have to include within it also that personage who, having been excluded for many years, had persisted in setting up the theater of his own literary work within the red walls of his home town, that’s to say, myself. Who in the end was I?—it was time by now that I began to ask myself precisely what, in the last lines of “A Memorial Tablet,” Geo Josz had enquired of himself. A poet, fine—but what else?
Not out of detachment, but rather perhaps the better to defend myself from an excess of emotional involvement, I had practically not figured at all in Five Stories of Ferrara. Telling the stories of others with a heart that was almost too fraternal, too conjoined, I had always taken care to keep myself hidden behind the screen of pathos and irony which syntax and rhetoric created. But from then on, I reasoned with myself, how could I continue in this fashion, reduced in essence to a hand which writes? How could I confront anew even the moral difficulty of the kind which I found myself facing at the end of “A Night,” when I had had to enter the small room of Pino Barilari, into which no one in the city besides his wife Anna had ever set foot, and had had to enter it only by means of the imagination and at the cost of many painful contortions? No—enough! Even if, following this, nothing would be more likely than that I would continue to play with geometric forms, prevalently spheres, cones, funnels, concentric circles and so on (this was a rule of art, and since I was so determined to express myself I’d better accept it!), from now on, on the stage of my little provincial theater it was myself that I would have to find a place for, one that was the right size and not of secondary importance.