The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (15 page)

“Don’t you think so?” she added, once. “And then, like you, he’s a literary man, he wants to write. I think I saw some of his poems, two or three years ago, on the third page of the
Corriere Jerrarese,
under the comprehensive title ‘Poems of an
avanguardista’*."
* A member of the 
Avanguardia Giovanile,
 the fascist organization which boys who went to the 
liceo
 were obliged to join.

“Good God!” I said. “But what d’you mean? I don’t follow.”

She laughed silently, I could hear perfectly well.

“Well, what I mean is, a bit of heartache won’t do him any harm,” she said. “
‘Non mi lasciare ancora, soj-Jerenza,’]
as Ungaretti says. He wants to write, doesn’t he? Well, let him stew in his ownjuice a bit, and then we’ll see. Anyway, all you have to do is look at him :

“Do not yet leave me, suffering.” you can see quite plainly that at heart all he wants is suffering.”

“You’re disgustingly cynical: quite a pair with Adriana.”

“Now that’s where you’re wrong. In fact I’m hurt. Adriana’s an innocent angel. Capricious, maybe, but innocent like-‘
tutte-le femmine di tutti-i sereni animali -che avvicinno a Dio.
*
* Umberto Saba: “all the females of all gentle animals that bring us near to God”.
 Whereas Micol’s good, I’ve told you so already and I’m telling you again, and 
always
knows what she’s up to, don’t forget.”

Rather more rarely she mentioned Giampiero Mal-nate, towards whom her attitude was always curious, fundamentally critical and sarcastic: as if she was jealous of the friendship between him and Alberto-a rather exclusive friendship, to tell the truth-but at the same time disliked admitting it, admitting being jealous, that is, and for that very reason was trying to “knock down the idol”.

According to her, “that” Malnate wasn’t even “physically attractive”: too big, too fat, too “fatherly” to be taken seriously from that point of view. He was one of those excessively hairy men who, however often they shave during the day, always look a bit dirty and unwashed: and, quite frankly, that just wasn’t pretty. Maybe, from what she could see of them through those enormously thick glasses that everlastingly camouflaged him (they seemed to make him sweat: it made you want to take them off for him), maybe his eyes weren’t too bad: grey eyes,
steel grey,
strong man’s eyes. But far too solemn and severe. Too constitutionally matrimonial. In spite of his scornfnl miso-gynism on the surface, such eternal feelings lurked underneath that they’d make any girl shiver, even the quietest and best-conducted.

He was a sulky old fellow, though: and not even as quaint as he seemed to think. She was willing to bet that if you questioned him carefully he’d tell you at some point that he felt uncomfortable in town clothes, and of course preferred the windcheaters, knickerbockers, and ski boots he wore on his everlasting weekends on Mottarone or Monte Rosa! That faithful old pipe of his, when you came to think of it, was pretty revealing: it meant an entire programme of masculine Lombard austerity, it was like flying a flag.

He and Alberto were greatfriends, although Alberto, whose character was more passive than a punching ball, was basically everyone’s friend and no one’s. They had spent whole years together in Milan : and this mattered, of course. But those endless confabulations they went in for, weren’t they really a bit much? Clackety-clack, on and on and on : the minute they met, nothing and no one could keep them apart and stop them nattermg away. And heaven knows what it was all about! Women? Of course not! Knowing Alberto, who’d always been pretty reserved, not to say mysterious, on the subject, she wouldn’t bet tuppence on it, quite honestly.

“D’you still see him?” I got round to asking her one day, slipping in the question in the most indifferent tone I could muster.

“Well, yes ... I think he sometimes comes along to see his old Alberto,” she answered calmly. “They shut themselves up in his room, have tea, smoke their pipes (Alberto’s been puffing away at one too, just lately), and talk and talk, blissfully happy doing nothing but talk.’’

She was too intelligent, too sensitive not to have guessed what I was hiding under my indifference: and that was a sudden piercing-and symptomatic-longing to see her again. But she behaved as if she hadn’t understood, without even indirectly mentioning the possibility that sooner or later I, too, might be invited to her house as well.

I spent the next night in great agitation. I slept, woke up, and slept again. And every time I dreamt ofher again.

I dreamt for instance that I was watching her play tennis with Alberto, just as I had done the first day I set foot in the garden. Again, in my dream, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Again 1 kept telling myself that she was splendid, that I liked her all rosy and sweating like that, with a line down the middle ofher forehead of almost ferocious keenness and determination, all strung up as she was in the effort ofbeating her smiling, rather slack and bored elder brother. But now I felt oppressed by a feeling of uneasiness, bitterness, almost unbearable pain. What was left of the child of ten years ago-Iwondered desperately-in this twenty-two-year-old MicOl, in shorts and a cotton shirt, in this Micol who seemed so free, so sporty, so modern (free above all), that you’d think she had spent the last years exclusively at the famous tennis centres of the world: London, Paris, the Cote d’Azur, Forest Hills? Yes-I thought, comparing them-there was still the child’s fair, floating hair with streaks that were almost white, and blue Scandinavian eyes, and honey-coloured skin, and on her breast, occasionaUy bouncing out of the neck of her shirt, the small gold disc of the
schiaddai. 
But otherwise?

Then we found ourselves shut up inside the carriage, in that grey, stuffy twilight: with Perotti outside, sitting up on his box, motionless, silent, beetling. If Perotti was up there-I reasoned to myself-with his back turned obstinately to us, obviously it was to avoid seeing what was happening or might happen inside the carriage, in fact out of servile discretion. But he knew just
everything
there was to know, the old lout, of course he did! His wife, that washed-out Vit-torina, spying through the half-shut coach-house door (occasionally I caught a glimpse of her small reptilian head, its smooth raven-black hair gleaming as it poked gingerly round the edge of the door: and one of her eyes, just the same colour, looking worried and dissatisfied), his wife was there on the watch, half in and half outside the door, stealthily making the sort of faces and gestures they had agreed on.

And we were even in her bedroom, Micol and I, but even this time we were not alone, but “bothered” -it was she who murmured it-by the “inevitable” outsider’s presence: this time it was Yor, crouched in the middle of the room like an enormous unbreakable idol, Yor staring at us with his two icy eyes, one black and one blue. The room was long and narrow, just like the coach-house; and like the coach-house full of things to eat: grapefruit, oranges, mandarins: and
lattimi,
above all,
lattimi
in rows like books on the shelves of big, austere, churchy-looking black bookcases, right up to the ceiling: and these
lattimi
weren’t objects made of glass, as Micol herself had tried to make me believe, but on the contrary, just as I had imagined, cheeses, yes, small, dripping, round, whitish cheeses, shaped like bottles. Laughingly, she pressed me to try one of her cheeses; and heavens, then she stood on tiptoe, and was just going to touch one of the ones placed on the top shelf(the ones at the top were best and freshest, she explained), but I said no, I simply wouldn’t accept it, I was in agony because, apart from the dog being there, I knew that while we were arguing, the water of the lagoon was rising fast outside. If I delayed even a little, the high tide would shut me in there quite definitely, and prevent my leaving her room without being seen. Actually I had gone there secretly, and at night, into Micol’s bedroom: without Alberto, or professor Ermanno, or signora Olga, or signora Regina, or Uncle Giulio or Uncle Federico, or the pure-minded signorina Blumenfeld knowing I was there. And Yor, the only one who knew, the only witness of the
thing 
there was
also
between us, Yor couldn’t talk about it.

I dreamt too that we talked, and at last without pretences, at last our cards on the table.

As usual, we quarrelled a bit: Micol saying that the
thing
between us had started the first day on which she and I, still full ofthe surprise of finding and recognizing one another, had slipped off to look round the park, and I was saying it wasn’t so, that I thought the
thing 
had begun even earlier, on the telephone, from the moment she had told me she’d grown “ugly”, a “rednosed old maid”. Deep down in me I’d never believed it, of course. And yet she couldn’t begin to imagine-I said, with a lump in my throat-how much her words made me suffer. In the days that followed, before I saw her again, I thought of them continually, unable to feel at peace.

“Oh well, maybe you’re right,” Micol agreed at this point, pityingly, laying her hand on mine. “If the idea that I’d grown red-nosed and ugly immediately bothered you, then I give in, it means you’re right. But, anyway, what are we to do now? Tennis is no excuse any more, and it’s not seemly or suitable to ask you to the house with the danger ofbeing trapped by the high tide (you see what Venice is like?).”

“What’s the need for that?” I retorted. “You could come outside, after all.”

“Me come out?!” she exclaimed, opening her eyes wide. “Well, dear friend,* let’s hear: where could I go?
"

“Well ... I don’t know. ...” I stammered. “On the Montagnone, say, or in piazza d’Armi, on the Aqueduct side, or else, if you’d hate to be compromised, in piazza della Certosa on the via Borso side. It’s there that everyone goes walking out, as you know perfectly well. I don’t know if yours did, but my parents did in their day. And what’s wrong with walking out, after all, when you get down to it? It’s not like making love! You’re on the first step, on the edge of the abyss. But before you get down to the bottom of the abyss, there’s quite a slope, you know!”

And I was on the point of adding that if, as it appeared, even piazza della Certosa wasn’t what she wanted, we might eventually take separate trains and meet in Bologna. But I was silent, unable to dare this * In English in the original.

even in a dream. And besides, shaking her head and smiling, she was already telling me it was pointless, impossible,
verboten:
she’d never come outside the house and garden with me. What was it? she said, winking amusedly. After she’d let me cart her round and round the usual “outdoor” places, in keeping with “the gentle erotic muse of the countryside”, was it Bologna I was already scheming to take her to? Yes, Bologna, and maybe one of the “big” hotels her grandmother Josette had patronized, like the
Brun,
or the
Baglioni-
but did I realize we’d have to comply with the request to give our precious rubber-stamped particulars at the reception desk?

The evening of the following day, as soon as I got back from a sudden trip to Bologna, to the university, I got on to the telephone.

Alberto answered it.

“How are things?” he drawled ironically, for once showing that he recognized my voice. “It’s ages since we met. How are you? What are you doing?”

Disconcerted, my heart thudding, I started talking at random: muddling up all kinds of things: my degree thesis which (this was true) loomed up ahead of me like an unscalable wall; the weather, which after that fortnight of rain had seemed to offer a glimmer of hope since morning (but you couldn’t trust it: the sharp air clearly showed that winter was upon us and those fine October days must now be forgotten), and adding an extremely detailed account of my quick “excursion to via Zamboni”-just as ifhe, Alberto, who was studying in Milan, should know Bologna as well as I did.

In the morning, I said, I had been to the university, where I had some things to fix up with the bursar, then I went up to the library to check a number of items for the Panzacchi bibliography I was preparing. At one o’clock I had lunch at the
Pappagallo:
not the one at the foot of the Asinelli, the so-called “dry” one* ; which, apart from being terribly expensive, didn’t really seem to me to live up to its reputation, but the other, the
Pappagallo in brodo,
which was in a little side street off via Galliera, and was known for its stews and soups, and for its cheapness, too, its really good value. In the afternoon I had seen a few friends, gone round the bookshops, had tea at the Zanarini, the one in piazza Galvani, at the end of the Pavaglione: in fact, I concluded, I hadn’t had a bad day, “pretty much as it was when I went there regularly”.

“And just think, before I went back to the station,” I went on at this point, quite out of the blue, and prompted by heaven knows what sudden desire to make up such a tale, “I even had time for a peep at via dell’ O ca.”