The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (11 page)

Those of us sitting round the umbrella rose and those who were playing stopped.

“Don’t get up,” said professor Ermanno, in his pleasant, musical voice. “Please don’t disturb yourselves. Do go on playing.”

Of course he wasn’t obeyed. Micol and Alberto introduced us at once: Micol did most ofit. Apart from giving our full names, she stopped to say what she supposed would arouse her father’s interest in each one of us: what we were studying and doing, in the first place. She started with me and Bruno Lattes, speaking of us both in a remote, noticeably objective tone: as if to stop her father, in those special circumstances, from showing the least sign of special friendships and preferences. We were the two “literary ones in the gang”, two “really bright ones”. Then she went on to Mal-nate, joking about his “rare” passion for chemistry which had made him leave a town as full of resources as Milan (“Mi7c« /’e
on gran MHanl
*
* “What a big city Milan is!”: Milanese dialect.
) to come and bury himself in a “poky hole” like Ferrara.

“He works in the industrial zone,” explained Alberto, simply and seriously. “In one of the Monte-catini factories.”

“They’re meant to produce synthetic rubber,” Micol went on, “but it seems they’ve not managed it yet.”

Possibly afraid her ironic tones might hurt the stranger, her father hastened to speak.

“You were at the university with Alberto, weren’t you?” he said, speaking directly to Malnate.

“Well, in a way we were,” said Malnate. “But actually I was three years ahead of him, and in a different faculty too. But we were the best of friends all the same.

“I know, I know. My son’s often spoken about you. He’s told us he was often at your home, and that your parents were extremely kind to him on several occasions. Will you thank them for us, when you see them again? In the meantime we’re delighted to have you here, in our house. And do come back, won’t you? . . . Come back whenever you like.”

He turned to Micol and asked her, indicating Adriana:

“And this young lady, who is she? If I’m not mistaken she’s a Zanardi. Or am I wrong?”

The conversation dragged on like that, until all the introductions were completed, including those of Car-letto Sani and Tonino Collevatti, whom Micol defined as the two “white hopes” of tennis in Ferrara. In the end, professor Ermanno and signora Olga, who had stayed by her husband the whole time without saying a word, just smiling benevolently at times, walked away towards the house still arm in arm.

Although professor Ermanno haO said good-bye with a cordial: “See you again soon,” qo one would have dreamt of taking this very seriously.

But the following Sunday, while Adriana Trentini and Bruno Lattes on one side, and Desiree Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo on the other, were playing a tremendously keen match in which, according to Adriana, who had got it up, they would repay her and Bruno, “morally at least”, for the ugly trick played on them by marchese Barbicinti (but things didn’t seem to be going quite the same way this time : Adriana and Bruno were losing, and pretty definitely so): suddenly, towards the end of the match, the entire “old guard” appeared along the path of climbing roses, one behind the other. They made quite a procession. At the head of it, professor Ermanno and his wife. There followed, shortly afterwards, the Herrera uncles from Venice: one, with a cigarette between his thick protuberant lips, hands clasped behind his back, looking around with the faintly embarrassed air of a townsman landed reluctantly in the country; the other a few yards behind him, with signora Regina on his arm, regulating his pace to his mother’s very slow one. If the T.B. specialist and the engineer were in Ferrara-I said to myself-they must be here for some religious celebration. But which? After Roshashana, which fell in October, I couldn’t remember any other feasts in the autumn. Could it be Succoth? Very likely. Unless Federico, the engineer, had equally probably been expelled from the State Railways, which suggested a special family council had been called. . . .

They sat down tidily, making hardly any noise. The only exception was signora Regina. As she was being settled into a deck-chair, she said two or three words in the family slang in her loud, deaf-woman’s voice; complaining, I think, of the garden’s dampness 
(“mucha umidita
”) at that hour. But her son Federico, the railway engineer, was still beside her, looking after her, and, no less loudly (but his tone was neutral: the tone of voice my father also used occasionally, in mixed company, when he wanted to communicate with a member of the family, and no one else), quickly quietened her, telling her to be
callada,
quiet. Couldn’t she see the
musafir?

I leant down to Micol’s ear.

“Instead of saying ‘be
callada’,
we say ‘be
sciadok'
But what does
musafir
mean?”

“Guest,” she whispered back to me.
“Goi,
though.” And she laughed, childishly covering her mouth with one hand and winking: Micol-1929-style.

Later, at the end of the match, and after the “new arrivals”, Desiree Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo had been introduced in their turn, I happened to find myself a little apart with professor Ermanno. In the park, the day was as usual snuffing out in diffused, milky shadows. I had moved away about ten steps.

Behind me I heard Micol’s sharp voice dominating the others. Heaven knows who she was grumbling at now, and why.

I looked towards the Wall of the Angels, still lit by the sun.

“Era gia l'ora che volge il disto,”*
* “Now in the hour that melts with homesick yearning”: Dante, 
Purgatory
 (translated by D. Sayers) a soft ironical voice declaimed beside me.

I turned, surprised. It was professor Ermanno, smiling good-naturedly at me, pleased to have made me start. He took me delicately by the arm, and then very slowly, pausing occasionally, we took a turn right round the tennis court, making a very wide circle well away from the wire-netting around it. In the end, though, so as not to risk ending up where we started, among the friends and relations, we turned back. Backwards and forwards: we repeated the manceuvre several times, in the gathering darkness. Meantime we talked: or rather he talked most of the time, professor Ermanno.

He began asking me what I thought of the tennis court, whether it really seemed to me so frightful. Micol had quite made up her mind: she said it needed remaking completely, up to modern standards. But he doubted it: maybe his “darling earthquake” was exaggerating, as usual, maybe they wouldn’t have to make a clean sweep of the whole thing, the way she wanted to.

“Whichever way it is,” he went on, “it’ll start raining in a few days, there’s no point in deluding ourselves. We’d better put off everything until next year, don’ t you agree ? ”

Then he went on to ask me what I was doing, what

I meant to do in the immediate future. And how my parents were.

While he asked me about “Papa”, I noticed two things: first ofall, that he found it hard to use the “tu” in addressing me, in fact, shortly afterwards he stopped suddenly and told me so explicitly, and immediately I asked him, very warmly and sincerely, to do so please, and told him he simply mustn’t call me
“lei”
or I’d be hurt. Secondly: that the interest and respect in his voice and face as I told him about my father’s health (in his eyes, chiefly: the glasses of his spectacles, enlarging them, accentuated the seriousness and mildness of their expression), was not at all forced, not in the least hypocritical. He urged me to remember him to my father. And to congratulate him, too: on the many trees planted in our cemetery, since the community had entrusted him with the task of seeing to it. In fact: would pines be any use? Cedars of Lebanon? Firs? Weeping willows? I was to ask my father. If by any chance they were of use (and in this day and age, with the methods of modern agriculture, transplanting even large-trunked trees was no trouble at all), he’d be very happy to put whatever number we wanted at our disposal. Why, it was a marvellous idea! Filled with large beautiful plants, our cemetery in time would rival the one of San Niccolo del Lido, in Venice.

“Don’t you know it?”

I said I didn’t.

“Oh, but you must, you really
must
try and visit it as soon as possible!” he said, with great liveliness. “It’s a national monument! Besides, you who are a literary man will obviously remember how Giovaimi Prati’s 
Edmenegarda
begins.’’

Once more I was forced to admit my ignorance.

“Well,” he went on, “Prati starts his
Edmenegarda
right there, in the Jewish cemetery of the Lido, which in the nineteenth century was considered one of the most romantic spots in Italy. Mind, though: if and when you go there don’t forget to tell the caretaker-he’s the one who’s got the keys of the gate-that you mean to visit the old cemetery, mind you say the old cemetery, where no one’s been buried since the eighteenth century, and not the other one, the modern one, which is beside it but separate. I discovered it in 1905, just think. Although I was twice your age, I was still a bachelor. I was living in Venice (I’d been settled there for two years) and the time I didn’t spend at the Record Office, at campo dei Frari, rummaging through the manuscripts concerned with the various so-called nations the Jewish community in Venice was divided into in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the Levantine nation, the western, the German, the Italian -1 spent there: sometimes even in winter. The fact is I hardly ever went there alone” -here he smiled-“and in a way, deciphering the stones in the cemetery one by one, many of which go back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and are written in Spanish and Portuguese, I was carrying on my archives work out of doors. Oh, those were exquisite afternoons . . . such peace, such serenity . . . with the little gate, facing the lagoon, which opened only for us. We actually became engaged there, Olga and I.”

He was silent for a while. I took advantage of it to ask him what was the exact object of his researches in the Record Office.

“At first I started off with the idea of writing a history of the Jews in Venice,” he answered. “A subject suggested to me by Olga herself, which Roth, the (Jewish) Englishman Cecil Roth, dealt with so brilliantly ten years later. Then as so often happens to historians who are too much . . . enamoured of their work, some seventeenth-century documents that happened to fall into my hands absorbed my interest completely, and ended up by carrying me away from the idea. I’ll tell you about it, I’ll tell you about it if you come back . . . it’s really like a novel, in every way . . . In any case, instead of a fat historical volume, in two years all I managed to put together-apart from a wife, of course-were two pamphlets: one, which I think is still useful, where I collected all the inscriptions in the cemetery, and one where I wrote about those seventeenth-century papers I mentioned, but just like that, putting down the facts and not trying to interpret them in any way. Would you be interested in seeing them? You would? Then one of these days I’ll give myself the pleasure of presenting you with copies of them, then. But, forgetting that for the moment: do please go along to the Jewish cemetery at the Lido! It’s well worth it, you’ll see. You’ll find it exactly the same as it was thirty-five years ago: identically the same.”

We went slowly back towards the tennis court. By the look ofit, there was nobody left there. And yet, in almost complete darkness, Micol and Carletto Sani were still playing. Micol was groaning: that the boy was making her run too much, that he was not being “a gentleman”, and that the darkness was, quite frankly, “a bit much”.

“Micol tells me you aren’t sure whether to take your degree in the history of art or in Italian,” professor Ermanno was saying to me, in the meantime. “Or have you now made up your mind?”

I answered that I had, that I’d finally decided on a thesis in Italian. My uncertainty, I explained, was due simply to the fact that until a few days ago I had hoped to be able to take my degree under Longhi, professor of the History of Art, and instead, at the last minute, professor Longhi had asked for and obtained leave of absence from teaching for two years. The thesis I had in mind to undertake under his guidance was on a group of Ferrarese painters in the second half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth: Scarsellino, Bastianino, Bastarolo, Bonone, Galetti, Calzolaretto. Only under Longhi would I have been able to do anything worth while on such a subject. And as Longhi had got the ministry’s permission to take two years off, I would rather do any old thesis, in Italian.

He listened to me, thoughtfully.

“Longhi?” he asked in the end, looking doubtful. “Who’s he? Have they
already
appointed the new professor to the chair of the History of Art?”

I didn’t understand.

“Why, yes,” he insisted. “I’ve always heard the Professor of the History of Art at Bologna is Igino Benvenuto Supino, one of the shining lights of Italian Jewry. So . . .”

So he had been-1 interrupted-so he had been: until 1933. After which, Roberto Longhi took over in ’34, when Supino retired on account of his age. Didn’t he know-1 went on, pleased to catch him slipping up over his facts as well-didn’t he know Roberto Longhi’s fundamental essay on Piero della Francesca? And his others on Caravaggio and his school? And the 
Officina ferrarese,
a work which had aroused so much interest in ’3 3, at the time of the Renaissance exhibition held here in the same year, at the Diamanti palace?

If I’d written the thesis, I’d have based myself on the final pages of the
Officina,
which just touched on the theme: in a masterly way, certainly, but without going deeply into it.

I talked, and professor Ermanno, more bent than ever, listened to me in silence. What was he thinking of? Of the number of“shining lights” ItalianJewry had given the universities since the unification of Italy? Very likely.

But suddenly I saw him grow animated.

Looking round and lowering his voice to a stifled whisper, neither more nor less than as if he were going to share a state secret with me, he told me the great news; that he owned a group of unpublished letters from Carducci, letters written by the poet to his mother in 1875. Would I be interested to see them?-he asked me. If by any chance I thought they would make a suitable subject for a thesis for my degree in Italian, he would be very happy to put them at my disposal.