“You’re not going to visit Sion Segre?” my father asked him. He expected Mario would immediately go in search of Sion Segre, his partner in their original misadventure.
“I’m not going to see him. We have nothing to say to each other anymore,” Mario said.
Nor did he want to go visit any of his siblings in their respective cities, even though he hadn’t seen them for years. He repeated what he’d said about Sion Segre: “By now we wouldn’t know what to say to each other!”
Nevertheless, he seemed happy to see Alberto who had returned to Turin after the war. He no longer despised him. “He must be a good doctor!” he said. “Not bad, as a doctor, he must be not at all bad!”
He asked Alberto about Cafi’s illness, describing his symptoms and telling him what the doctors who were treating him said. Cafi lived in Bordeaux and at this point was bedridden, had lost all his strength, and could barely talk anymore.
How Mario had coped during those years we came to know piecemeal, in brief snatches, from the terse and impatient things he occasionally dropped into the conversation, grumbling and shrugging his shoulders, almost irritated that we didn’t already know what he was talking about. He was in Paris during the German advance, having left that boarding school in the countryside where he’d been teaching and returned, with his cat, to live in the attic room. Every day the Germans advanced farther and Mario said to Cafi that they should get out of Paris, but Cafi had a bad foot and didn’t want to move. Chiaromonte, his wife having died in the hospital just a few days before, decided to go to America. He embarked from Marseille on the last civilian ship still sailing.
Mario finally persuaded Cafi to leave Paris. With the Germans by now only a kilometer away, it was impossible to find any means of transportation so they set off on foot. Cafi limped along leaning on Mario and they made their way with an exasperating slowness. Every so often Cafi sat down to rest by the side of the road and Mario redid his bandage. They then started walking again and Cafi, wearing a slipper and a thick sock darned with red wool, dragged his painful foot through the dust.
They ended up in a village near Bordeaux. Mario was interned in a camp for foreign refugees. When he was let out, he joined the Maquis. At the end of the war he was in Marseille and part of the Purge Commission. Chiaromonte returned to Paris from America and he, Mario, and Cafi resumed their friendship. It didn’t even occur to Mario to return to Italy to live. In fact, he’d requested French citizenship.
He secured a position as the financial adviser to a French industrialist and with this Frenchman drove to Italy, where Mario showed the industrialist around the museums and factories. The Frenchman, however, actually drove the car because Mario still hadn’t learned to drive. My father and mother anxiously wondered if this new job had any future or if it was temporary and precarious.
“I’m afraid he’s wound up doing some silly little job!” my mother said. “It’s such a shame! He’s so intelligent!”
“But who is that Frenchman?” my father said. “He seems shady to me!”
Mario didn’t stay in Italy more than a week. He left with the Frenchman and we didn’t see him again for a long time.
•
The once small publishing house had become big and important. Many people worked there now. It had moved to a new location in the Corso Re Umberto, the old office having been destroyed during an air raid. Pavese had an office to himself with “Editorial Director” written on a sign on the door. He sat at his desk smoking his pipe while reviewing page proofs at lightning speed. Whenever he took a break from work, he read the Iliad out loud in Greek, chanting the verses in his sad, singsong voice. Or he worked on his novels, writing rapidly and violently crossing things out as he went along. He’d become a famous writer.
The publisher—handsome, with a ruddy complexion, a long neck, and hair slightly graying at his temples like the wings of a dove—was in the office next to Pavese’s. On his desk, he now had many telephones with bells and buzzers and he no longer yelled, “Coppaaa!” In any case, Signorina Coppa didn’t work there anymore. The old warehouseman was also gone. Now when the publisher wanted to call someone, he pushed a button and talked on an internal telephone with the floor below where there were many typists and warehousemen. Every so often, the publisher walked up and down the hallway with his hands clasped behind his back, his head tilted towards his shoulder, peering into the offices of his employees and, in his nasal voice, telling them something. The publisher was not shy anymore, or rather, he became shy only when he had to have meetings with people he didn’t know, and even then it didn’t seem like timidity overcame him but rather a cold, silent mysteriousness. This shyness of his intimidated outsiders who, caught in his icy, luminous, blue-eyed gaze, felt they were being sized up and scrutinized as they sat on the opposite side of his glass-top desk at an icy and luminous distance. That shyness of his had become a great business tool, a powerful force against which outsiders, like dazzled moths flying into a light, collided. And if they had arrived confidently, their briefcases filled with projects and proposals, by the end of the meeting they would find themselves strangely exhausted and disconcerted by the unpleasant suspicion that they might have been a bit stupid and unsophisticated as they pitched superficial projects to a cold interrogator who had silently scrutinized and dissected them.
Pavese rarely agreed to see outsiders. He said, “I’m busy! I don’t want to see anyone! Let them hang themselves! I don’t give a damn!”
The new young employees, on the other hand, liked to meet with outsiders. Outsiders could bring in ideas.
Pavese said, “We don’t need ideas! We have too many ideas as it is!”
The internal phone on his desk rang and from the receiver came that notorious nasal voice saying, “So-and-so is downstairs. Have him come up and see you. He might have a proposal or two.”
Pavese would say, “Who needs proposals? We’re up to our ears in proposals! I don’t give a damn about proposals! I don’t want ideas!”
“Get Balbo to do it then,” the voice said.
Balbo accommodated everyone. He never refused to meet someone new. Balbo had nothing against proposals and ideas. He liked all proposals and ideas, felt stimulated by them, and when they excited him, he brought them to Pavese. Balbo—a small, serious man with a red nose—became even more serious whenever he had a proposal to show Pavese, whenever he believed he’d landed on a new human experience, awed as he was always awed before every new human innovation that appeared on his horizon, always disposed to see the intelligence in all things, to see it teeming in all the nooks and crannies his penetrating and innocent, gullible and intense, small blue eyes gazed upon. Balbo would talk and talk and Pavese would smoke his pipe, twisting his hair around his finger.
Pavese would say, “It’s an idiotic proposal! Beware of idiots!”
And Balbo would respond that, yes, it was partially an idiotic proposal but that it was also not that idiotic, that it had a very good, lively, and fertile kernel at its core, and Balbo would go on and on because he was always talking, never quiet. When he had finished talking with Pavese, the small, serious man with the little red nose went into the publisher’s office and spoke to him, and the publisher would rock back and forth in his chair, his legs crossed, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, and every so often he would look up from the piece of paper on which he was doodling geometric shapes and flash one of those clear, cold looks of his.
Balbo never corrected page proofs. He said, “I’m not capable of correcting page proofs! I’m too slow. It’s not my fault!”
He never read a whole book. He read a few sentences here and there, then got up to go speak to someone about what he’d read because everything sparked his interest, everything got him excited and set him off on a train of thought that chugged on and on, and by nine o’clock at night he was still there, speaking among the desks, because he had no schedule, never remembered to go have a meal. Only when all the desks were empty and the office w
as deserted would he look at his watch with a start, put on his coat, and pull his green hat firmly down over his forehead. He walked down the Corso Re Umberto, that erect little man carrying his briefcase under his arm, and he would stop to look at the parked motorcycles and scooters because he was greatly intrigued by all machines and had a special fondness for motorcycles.
Pavese would say to him, “Must you always talk while everyone else is working?”
And the publisher would say, “Leave him alone!”
On the wall in his office the publisher had hung a portrait of Leone: his hat slightly at an angle, his eyeglasses low on his nose, his thick black hair, his deeply dimpled cheeks, his feminine hands. Leone had died in prison, in the German section of the Regina Coeli prison one icy February in Rome during the German occupation.
I never saw the three of them—Leone and Pavese and the publisher—together again after that spring when the Germans took France, except for once when Leone and I came back from exile where we’d been sent soon after Italy entered the war. We’d been given a permit to return home for just a few days, and while we were there we often had dinner with Pavese and the publisher, and others who were becoming important at the publishing house, others who had come from Rome and Milan with projects and ideas. Balbo wasn’t there though because at the time he had gone to war and was fighting on the Albanian front.
Pavese almost never mentioned Leone. He didn’t like to speak of those absent or dead. He said so himself: “When someone goes away, or dies, I try not to think about him because I don’t like to suffer.”
Still, perhaps he suffered from time to time over Leone’s loss. They’d been best friends. Perhaps his loss numbered among the things that tormented Pavese. He certainly wasn’t able to spare himself the suffering he endured every time he fell in love; his suffering at those times was most bitter and cruel. Love came over him like a bout of fever. It lasted a year or two and then he recovered from it, but he was dazed and exhausted like someone after a grave illness.
That spring, the last spring in which Leone worked regularly at the publishing house, when the Germans took France and Italy awaited war, that spring seemed to become ever-more distant, in the past. Even the war, little by little, receded into the distant past. For a long time at the publishing house there were brick stoves used when the heating didn’t work because of the war. The boilers for the radiators were then fixed but those stoves stayed around for a long time. Then the publisher had them taken away. Manuscripts were scattered in messy piles throughout the offices since there weren’t enough bookcases. Finally, Swedish bookcases that reached all the way to the ceiling were built with removable shelves. At the end of the hallway, a wall was painted black and prints and reproductions of paintings were tacked up on it. Then the tacks were removed and real paintings in glistening frames were hung on the wall.
•
He was in Belgium during the German invasion. He’d stayed in Liège right until the last minute, working at his institute, unable to believe that the Germans would arrive so soon, remembering the other war when they’d stopped outside the gates of Liège for fifteen days. Now, though, with the Germans on the verge of entering the city, he finally decided to close the by then deserted institute and to get out of there; he went to Ostend. He arrived there on foot, hitching a ride whenever possible as he made his way along the crowded roads. At Ostend, he was recognized by someone in a Red Cross ambulance and given a lift. He was made to wear a white coat and the ambulance got as far as Boulogne where it was commandeered by the Germans. My father was brought before the Germans and told to state his name. Even though it was obviously a Jewish name, they said nothing about it, asking him what his plans were. He told them he intended to return to Liège, and they took him there.
He stayed in Liège another year. He was alone that year, since no one else was at the institute anymore, not even his student and friend Chèvremont. He was then advised to return to Italy, and so he came back to my mother in Turin. My father and mother stayed in Turin until their place was damaged during an air raid. During the bombings, my father never wanted to go down into the cellar. Every time there was an air raid my mother had to beg him to go down into the cellar with her, telling him that if he didn’t go down she wouldn’t go either.
“Nitwitteries!” he would say on the stairs. “If the building collapses, the cellar will certainly collapse too! The cellar is hardly safe! This is an utter nitwittery!”
They then took refuge in Ivrea. When the armistice was announced, my mother happened to be in Florence and my father sent word for her to stay put. In Ivrea, he was staying at the house of one of Piera’s aunts who’d fled elsewhere. He was advised to hide because the Germans were searching for and deporting Jews. He hid in the countryside in an empty house loaned to him by friends, and he finally agreed to get falsified identification papers—his new name was Giuseppe Lovisatto. When he went to visit friends, and the woman who answered the door asked who she should say was calling, he always gave his real name. “Levi. No, I mean, Lovisatto,” he’d say. He was then warned that he’d been recognized and left for Florence.
They stayed in Florence, my father and mother, until the north was liberated. There was little to eat in Florence and my mother would say, as she gave each of my children an apple at the end of a meal, “An apple for the little ones and a devil to peel them for the big ones.” And she told them about Signora Grassi who every evening during the other war would divide a walnut into four pieces. “A walnut, Lidia!” And she gave her four children—Erika, Dina, Clara, and Franz—a piece each.
•
When Leone and I lived in the Abruzzi in exile, my mother liked very much to come visit us. She also went to visit Alberto who wasn’t very far away in Rocca di Mezzo. She compared one village to the other and announced that they both made her think of The Daughter of Iorio. Since there was nowhere for her to sleep at our place, she stayed in a hotel. The only hotel in the village had a few rooms clustered around a kitchen with an arbor, a vegetable garden, and a terrace. Behind it were fields and then, in the distance, low, bare, windswept hills. We had become friendly with the hotel owners, a mother and daughter, and we used to spend our days with them, whether my mother was staying there or not, in that kitchen and on that terrace. We discussed, in that kitchen during winter evenings and on that terrace in the summer, everyone in the village including the internees who had, like us, come with the war and blended into village life, sharing its fortunes and woes. Like us, my mother learned the nicknames that had been given by the town to internees and villagers alike. There were many internees, both rich and very poor. The rich ate better, buying flour and bread on the black market, but aside from the food, they led the same life as the poor, sitting sometimes in the hotel kitchen or on the terrace, or sometimes in Ciancaglini’s haberdashery shop.
There were the Amodajes, wealthy hosiery merchants from Belgrade; a cobbler from Fiume; a priest from Zara; a dentist; two German-Jewish brothers named Bernardo and Villi, one a dance instructor and the other a stamp collector; a crazy old Dutch woman known in the village as “Skinny Shins” because she had thin ankles; and many more.
Before the war, Skinny Shins had published volumes of poetry in praise of Mussolini. “I wrote poems for Mussolini! What a mistake!” she said to my mother when she met her on the street, raising her long hands to the heavens. She wore white musketeer gloves that had been given to her by I don’t know which society for Jewish refugees. Skinny Shins spent her entire day going up and down the street, as if in a daze, stopping to talk with people to whom she told her troubles while raising her gloved hands to the heavens. All the internees walked up and down the street like this, going to and fro a hundred times a day over the same stretch of road because it was forbidden for us to venture into the countryside.
“Do you remember Skinny Shins? Whatever happened to her?” my mother said to me many years later.
My mother, when she came to visit us in the Abruzzi, al
ways brought a small tub with her because bathtubs didn’t exist there and she was constantly preoccupied with being able to find a way to wash in the morning. She also brought one for us and had me bathe the children many times a day because in every letter my father wrote he recommended that they be washed frequently since we were in a primitive village lacking any standards in hygiene. A servant we had at the time used to say, with an expression of repugnance, whenever she saw us washing the children, “They’re cleaned so often they shine like gold.”
This servant was large, around fifty, and always dressed in black. Her father and mother were still alive and she called them “the old man” and “the old woman.” In the evening, before she went home, she gathered packets of sugar and coffee up into a bundle and tucked a bottle of wine under her arm, saying, “May I? I want to bring something to the old woman! I want to bring a little wine to the old man. He really enjoys it!”
Alberto was transferred farther north. This transfer north was seen as a good thing. Whoever was transferred north had a greater probability of being set free sooner. Every so often, we too requested to be transferred north, but we would have been sad to leave the Abruzzi, just as Miranda and Alberto had regretted it, finding their new place of exile in Canavese dull. In any case, our transfer requests were ignored.
My father, he too came to visit us sometimes. He found the village dirty. It reminded him of India. “It’s like India!” he said. “The filth in India is unimaginable! The filth I saw in Calcutta! In Bombay!” Talking about India made him very happy. He became animated with pleasure whenever he mentioned Calcutta.
When my daughter, Alessandra, was born, my mother stayed with us for a long while. She didn’t want to leave. It was the summer of ’43. We all hoped the war would end soon. It was a calm period and these were the last months we would spend together, Leone and I. My mother finally left and I accompanied her to L’Aquila. While we were waiting for the bus in the square, I had the feeling that I should prepare myself for a long separation. Actually, I had the disorienting feeling that I would never see her again.
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