The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (16 page)

“Via dell’Oca?” said Alberto, suddenly livening up, yet sounding alarmed.

This was all I needed to discover in myself my father’s sour wish to appear much cruder and more 
goi
than he really was, compared with the Finzi-Continis.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Never heard of via dell’Oca? Why, that’s where you find one of the most famous . . . little family hotels in Italy.”

He coughed, embarrassed.

“No, I didn’t know it.”

Then, abruptly changing the tone and subject, he said that in a few days he too would have to leave for Milan, staying there at least a week. June wasn’t as far ahead as it seemed, and he hadn’t yet found a don 

*
The “dry” one because it specialized in
pasta.

who’d give him the chance of “stringing some old thesis together” : in fact, to be quite honest, he hadn’t even tried to.

Then he jumped to another subject (his voice, meantime, had recovered its usual bored, mocking tone), and asked me ifl’d happened to be riding my bicycle along the Wall of the Angels just lately. He’d been out in the garden, seeing what sort of state the rain had reduced the tennis court to. But partly because of the distance, and partly because the light was going, he couldn’t be sure if it really was me sitting up on the saddle, leaning one hand against a tree trunk up there, and gazing down, perfectly still. Oh, so it was? he went on, after I had admitted, not without hesitation, that I had in fact gone along the Wall of the Angels on the way home from the station: because, I explained, it made me shudder every time, deep down inside me, to pass some of those ugly mugs that collected opposite the Caffe della Borsa, in Corso Roma, or lined up along Giovecca. Ah, so it was me? he repeated. He thought it was! Well then, if it was, why hadn’t I answered his shouts and whistles? Hadn't I heard him?

No, I hadn’t, I lied once again; in fact I hadn’t even noticed he was in the garden. And now we really had nothing else to say, nothing with which to fill the sudden silence that had opened up between us.

“But . . . you wanted to talk to Micol, didn’t you?” he said at last, as if remembering.

“Yes,” I answered. “D’you mind putting me through?”

He’d have been happy to, he replied: but-and it was very odd that, as far as he could see, the “dear girl” hadn’t warned me-Micol had left for Venice early that afternoon, meaning to “get a move on” with her thesis, too. She had come down to lunch all dressed up for the journey, with her suitcase and all, and “to the family’s dismay” announced what she meant to do. She was fed up, she said, with trailing the work along behind her. Instead of taking her degree inJune she’d take it in February, and with the
Marciana
and the
Querini-Stampalia
available in Venice, it would be perfectly easy, whereas in Ferrara she couldn’t get on, her thesis on Emily Dickinson, for all sorts of reasons, would never get ahead as fast as it should (this was what she said, at least). Heaven knows how Micol would put up with the depressing atmosphere of Venice, and of a house, her uncles’, which she disliked. It was highly likely that in a week or two we’d see her back to base again, with damn all done. He’d think he was dreaming if Micol ever managed to stay away from Ferrara for more than three weeks or a month on end. . . .

“Ah well, we shall see,” he concluded. “In any case, what would you say (this week’s impossible and so’s next, but the one after that I think really I could), what would you say to driving up to Venice together? It would be fun to land on my little sister: you and I and Giampi Malnate, say!”

“It’s an idea,” I said. “Why not? We might talk it over.

“In the meantime,” he went on, with an effort in which I sensed a sincere wish to compensate me, at least a little, for what he’d just told me, “in the meantime, if you’ve nothing better to do, why don’t you come and see me here at home? Say tomorrow, about five in the afternoon? That Malnate’ll be here, too, I think. We can have tea . . . listen to some records . . . talk. I don’t know if you, being a literary man, would want to spend time with an engineer (that’s poor me) and an industrial chemist. But if you’ll
deign
to, let’s not be formal: come along, and we’ll be delighted.”

We went on for a bit longer, Alberto growing more and more excited and enthusiastic at his idea, which seemed to have come to him quite suddenly, ofhaving me to his home, and I attracted by it but at the same time repelled. Yes, it was perfectly true-I remembered -that a little earlier I'd gazed down at the garden for nearly half an hour from the top of the Wall of the Angels, and above all at the house, which, from where I was, and through the almost leafless branches of the trees, I saw cut out against the evening sky from base to pinnacled roof, frail and elongated as an heraldic emblem. Two windows on the mezzanine floor, at the level of the terrace leading down into the garden, were already lit up, and the electric light shone above, as well, from the single, very high window that opened just under the top of the end tower. For a long time, my eyes aching in their sockets, I had stayed there, staring at the little light in the upper window-a calm, tremulus glimmer that hung in the gradually darke^rng air like a star-and only Alberto’s distant whistles and Tyrolean yells, that made me afraid of being recognized, and my longing to hear Micol’s voice at once on the telephone, managed to chase me away. . . .

But what now?-I asked myself gloomily. What did I care about going to
their
house, ifMicol was no longer there?

But when I came out of the telephone room and my mother told me that Micol Finzi-Contini had rung up and asked for me about midday (“she asked me to tell you she’d got to leave for Venice, she said good-bye and that she’d write,” my mother went on, looking away), it was enough to make me suddenly change my mind. In fact from that moment the time separating me from five o’clock next day started crawling.

So it was then that I began being a daily guest in Alberto’s own room (he called it his studio; and so it was, with a bedroom and an adjoining bathroom), in that famous room behind double doors, from which, as she went by it in the passage, Micol heard nothing but the jumbled voices of her brother and his friend Malnate, and where, apart from the maids coming with the tea trolley, I never met a single other member of the family during the entire winter. Oh, that winter of’3 8-’3 9! I remember those long motionless months, that seemed strung above time and despair (in February it snowed, and Micol still wasn’t back from Venice), and even now, more than twenty years later, the four walls of Alberto Finzi-Contini’s room go back to being my vice, the drug that, without my realizing it, I needed every day, at that time . . . .

I was not at all in despair that first December evening when I crossed Barchetto del Duca on my bicycle again. Micol had left: yet I pedalled along the drive in the darkness and the fog, as if expecting to see her, and only her, a little later. I was excited and gay: almost happy. I looked round me, my bicycle lamp searching out places from a past that seemed to me distant, admittedly, but still recoverable, not yet lost. Here was the little wood of rattan canes; there, but farther ahead, on the right, the vague outline of Perotti’s house, from a first-floor window of which came a yellowish glow; there, still farther on, loomed the eerie framework of the bridge over the Panfilio canal: and here at last, forecast a bit ahead by the crunch of my tyres on the gravel of the open space in front, the gigantic bulk of the 
magna domus,
inaccessible as an isolated rock, and entirely dark except for the very bright white light coming through the cracks of a small side door, obviously left open to welcome me.

I got off my bicycle and stood a moment looking through the deserted doorway; and saw, cut obliquely across by the black left-hand side of the door, which had stayed shut, a steep staircase carpeted in red: a vivid scarlet, the colour of blood, with polished brass stair-rods that gleamed like gold.

I leant the bicycle against the wall, bending over to padlock it. And I was still there in the shadows, down beside the door through which, apart from the light, came a fine warmth from the central heating (in the darkness I couldn't manage to work the padlock, and was just thinking of lighting a match to get a better look), when professor Ermanno's familiar voice suddenly came from beside me.

“What are you doing? Locking it up?” he said, standing at the doorway. “That's good idea. You never know, you can never be too careful.”

Without knowing, as usual, whether his faintly querulous kindness was secretly mocking me, I got up at once.

“Good evening,” I said, taking off my hat and holding out my hand.

“Good evening, dear boy,” he replied. “But keep on your hat, do keep it on!”

I felt his small fat hand slide almost sluggishly into mine, and then draw away at once. He wore no coat, but an old sports cap was rammed down over his spectacles and a woollen scarf wound round his neck.

He looked mistrustfully sidelong, in the direction of the bicycle.

“You have locked it, haven’t you?”

I said I hadn’t. And then, put out, he insisted on my going back and locking it up as he asked me to, because, he repeated, you never knew. It wasn’t likely to get stolen-he kept saying from the doorway, as I tried to get the padlock and chain round the spokes of the back wheel again-but you couldn’t really trust the garden wall. Along it, and especially on the Wall of the Angels side, there were at least ten places where any moderately agile boy would have no trouble at all in getting over. And getting out afterwards, even burdened with a bike across his shoulders, would be nearly as easy.

At last I managed to fix the padlock; then looked up, but the doorway was empty.

Professor Ermanno was waiting for me in the little hall at the foot of the stairs. I went in, careful to shut the door behind me, and only then did I realize that he was looking at me in a worried, regretful way.

“I wonder,” he said, “whether you wouldn’t have done better to bring the bike right inside. ... In fact, do that next time you come, bring it right in. If you leave it there under the stairs it won’t be in anyone’s way.”

He turned and started going up the stairs ahead of me. He went slowly, hobbling more than ever and holding on to the banister with one hand, with his cap still on and the scarf round his neck. Meantime he talked, or rather muttered: as if talking to himself rather than to me.

Alberto had told him I was coming to see him today. And as Perotti had been in bed all day with a slight temperature (just a touch of bronchitis: but he was being looked after, to avoid any possible infection, apart from everything else . . .) for once in a while he’d taken on the job of watchman. You couldn’t rely on Alberto, who was always so absent-minded, so distracted, so much in the clouds, as we all knew. If Micol were at home, now, he wouldn’t worry in the least, because Micol, heaven knows how, always managed to see to everything, not just her own studies, but the running of the house in general, and even of the kitchen, for which in fact-and a very good thing too, in a woman !-she had a passion only slightly less intense than her passion for literature. (It was she who made up accounts at the end of the week with Gina and Vittorina, she who saw personally to cutting the throats of the poultry, when necessary: in spite of the fact that she loved animals so much, poor pet!). But Micol wasn’t at home that day (had Alberto told me she wasn’t there?), as she'd had to leave for Venice yesterday afternoon, alas; which explained why he, in the absence of their “guardian angel” and of Perotti, had, for the moment, to act as porter.

He talked of other things, too, which I cannot remember. But at last he returned to Micol again, not to take pleasure in her this time, but to regret her “recent uneasiness”-these were his actual words, and he sighed -an uneasiness which, according to him, obviously depended on “so many factors”, of course, but above all ... here he was suddenly silent, and said no more about it. And during all this time we had not only reached the top of the stairs but had gone down two passages and through several rooms, professor Ermanno still in the vanguard and not letting me catch up with him except when he switched off the lights.

Absorbed as I was in what he was saying about Micol (the detail that it was she, with her own hands, who killed the chickens in the kitchen fascinated me strangely), I looked about, but almost without seeing. In any case we were passing through rooms not unlike those in other houses of Ferrarese good society, Jewish and non-Jewish, filled with the usual sorts of furniture: monumental cupboards, hefty seventeenth-century locker-seats, with lion’s feet, refectory-type tables, folding leather chairs with bronze buttons, upholstered armchairs, complicated glass or wrought-iron lamps hanging from the centre of beamed wooden ceilings and thick carpets spread everywhere on dark shining wooden floors, tobacco-coloured, carrot, ox-blood red. Here, perhaps, there were more nineteenth-century paintings, landscapes and portraits, and more books, most of them bound volumes in rows behind the glass oflarge, dark mahogany bookcases. Big radiators centrally heated the house to such a pitch that, if it had been at home, my father would have called it crazy (I seemed to hear him !) : it was the warmth of a large hotel rather than a private house, and in fact enough to make me start sweating almost at once, and needing to take off my overcoat.