The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (19 page)
Even physically he tended to take cover, to vanish, to fade out. As a rule, Malnate and I sat facing each other in the middle of the room, one on the sofa and the other in one of the two armchairs, with the table between us, and both of us well in the light; and once we had sat down, we never got up except to go to the bathroom, or else to look at the state of the weather through the big horizontal window facing the park. Alberto, quite unlike us, preferred to tuck himself away, and sheltered behind the double barricade of the desk and the drawing-board. More often, though, we saw him tiptoeing about the room, his elbows close to his sides. He changed the records, always careful that the volume of sound didn’t drown our voices; saw to the ashtrays, emptying them in the bathroom when they were full; regulated the indirect lighting; asked us softly if we wanted more tea; put things in their proper place. He had the busy, unobtrusive air of a host with only one thing on his mind: that his guests’ important brains should do their job in the most favourable conditions and surroundings.
Yet I am sure it was his meticulous tidiness and relentless, obsessive efforts on our behalf that gave his room the vaguely oppressive air I noticed at once when I first came into it. When, for instance, in a pause in the conversation he began to illustrate say, the virtues of the armchair I was sitting in, the back of which, he said, had been “studied” to give the backbone the most “anatomically” correct and favourable position; or when, say, in offering me the box of pipe tobacco for me to help myself, he reminded me of the various qualities of cut which, according to him, were indispensable if our respective Dunhills and G.B.D.s were to give the best results (mild: so much; strong: so much; Maryland: so much); or finally when, for reasons that were never very clear, and known only to him, he smilingly announced that one or two of the radiogram’s amplifiers had been temporarily suspended: in every such case there was a nervous outburst, an uncontrolled protest just below the surface in me, ready to break out.
One evening, in fact, I could no longer control myself Of course-1 shouted at Malnate-his dilettante’s attitude, which was basically a tourist’s one, could allow him to be mild and indulgent towards Ferrara to an extent I envied. But how would he, who carried on about treasures of honesty, intelligence and goodness, judge what had happened to me, yes, to me, just a few mornings before?
I had had the bright idea-l started telling them-of moving over with my books and papers to the reading room of the city library in via Scienze: a place I’d used a great deal in the last few years, but where they’d known me, please note, since my schooldays, as it was there I used to go whenever the fear ofbeing questioned at maths made me play truant. It was a second home to me, where everyone, especially since I’d taken up literature, had always gone out of the way to be kind. Ever since then the director, Dr. Ballola, had started considering me a kind of colleague, and he never saw me there without coming to sit beside me, and telling me about the progress of his ten-year-old researches into some biographical material of Ariosto which he kept in his own private study, researches that would allow him (he said so himself) to go a great deal further than the important work already achieved in this field by the famous Catalano. And as for the various employees : they treated me in such a trusting friendly way that they generally excused me the chore of filling in a special form for every volume I wanted, and when there weren’t many people around they even let me smoke the odd cigarette.
Well then, as I was saying, I had the bright idea of spending the morning at the library. But I’d hardly had time to sit down at a table in the reading room and take what I needed out of my brief-case, before one of the employees, a fat jolly fellow of about sixty, called Poledrelli, famous for the amount of pasta he could put away and unable to string two words together except in dialect, came up to tell me to leave at once. Strutting along with his great belly tucked in and his chest stuck out, and actually managing to express himself in proper Italian, the dear good soul explained in a loud official voice that the director had given precise orders on the subject: and so-he repeated-would I kindly get up and clear out, at the double. The reading room was particularly crowded with secondary schoolboys that morning, and the scene was followed in sepulchral silence by no less than fifty pairs of eyes and as many pairs of ears. Well this alone-1 went on -made it hardly pleasant for me to get up, collect my books and papers from the table, shove the lot away in my brief-case, and then, step by step, reach the glass door. All right, then: that creep Poledrelli had done nothing but carry out orders! But ifMalnate happened to meet him (and it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility that Poledrelli might belong to the schoolmistress Trotti’s little gang), he should be very careful not to let himself be taken in by the phony air of good nature on that great plebeian mug of his. Inside that chest as huge as a cupboard there lurked a heart just as tiny as this: pumping his working-class blood round all right, but not the least bit to be trusted.
So ! -I said. So then ! -Wasn’t it to say the least out of place for him, to come along and preach-well, I wouldn’t say to Alberto, whose family had always steered clear of communal life in Ferrara, but to me, who was born and had grown up in a circle that was perhaps rather too ready to open up trustfully, to join in with others in everything and for everything? My father had volunteered in the war and joined the fascist party in 1919; I myself had belonged to the G.U.F.* until just now. In fact, we’d always been the most normal people you could think of, so normal we were downright banal, in fact, and for this reason it seemed to me really ridiculous that now he should suddenly expect us to behave in an exceptional way, just like that, out ofthe blue. Summoned to the Federation to hear himself expelled from the party, and so kicked out of the Circolo dei Commercianti as undesirable: it would have been most peculiar if my father, poor man, had looked less agonized and bewildered than he did in the face of such treatment. And what about my brother Ernesto, who’d had to leave Italy if he wanted to go to the university, and take a course at the Polytechnic at Grenoble? And my sister Fanny, who was just thirteen, and had to carry on her schooling at the Jewish school in via Vignatagliata? Did he expect them, wrenched suddenly away from all their friends at school and at home, to behave in any remarkable way? Well, not to worry: one of the hatefullest forms of anti-semitism was this very thing: complaining that the Jews weren’t enough like other people, and then, admitting they’d been pretty well assimilated into their background, complaining of the opposite: that they were exactly the same as everyone else, that is, and not the least bit out of the common run.
I had let myself be carried away by anger, and had gone rather beyond the limits of what we were discussing; which Malnate, who had been listening carefully, didn’t fail to point out to me at the end. He, anti-semitic?-he muttered; quite frankly this was the very first time he’d ever been accused of such a thing! Stil excited, I was just going to say more, and really rub it in, when I saw Alberto, flitting confusedly behind my opponent with the speed of a frightened bird, fling me an imploring look. “That’s enough, I beseech you!” his look said. The fact that, without his bosom friend realizing it, he made such an appeal to what was most secret between the two of us, struck me as quite extraordinary. I didn’t answer, I said no more. And at once the first notes of a Beethoven quartet played by the Busches rose in the smoky atmosphere of the room to seal my victory.
This was not the only important thing that evening, though. Around eight o’clock it started raining so violently that Alberto, after a quick telephone talk in the familyjargon, probably with his mother, suggested we should stay to supper.
Malnate said he accepted with pleasure. As a rule he had supper at
Giovanni’s,
he told us, “as lonely as a dog”: he just couldn’t believe he was going to spend an evening “with friends”. I accepted too, but asked if I could ring home.
“Why, of course!” exclaimed Alberto.
I sat down where he usually sat, behind the desk, and dialled the number. As I waited, I looked out sideways through the windows streaked with rain. The clumps of trees were scarcely visible through the thick darkness. Beyond the blackness of the park, heaven knows where, a small light glimmered.
My father’s doleful voice answered at last.
“Oh, is that you?” he said. “We were beginning to be anxious. Where are you ringing from?”
“I’m staying out to supper,” I answered.
“In this rain !”
“That’s just why.”
“Are you still at the Finzi-Continis’ ?”
“Yes.”
“Come in and see me a minute, will you, whatever time you get home. As you know, I can’t get to sleep. . .
I put down the receiver and looked up. Alberto was watching me.
“Done?” he said.
“Done.”
The three of us went out into the passage, crossed various rooms, large and small, went down a big staircase at the foot of which Perotti was waiting, in a jacket and white gloves, and then went straight into the dining-room.
The rest of the family was already there: professor Ermanno, signora Olga, signora Regina, and one of the uncles from Venice, the T.B. specialist, who got up when he saw Alberto come in, and went up and kissed him on both cheeks, after which, as he absent-mindedly lowered the rim of Alberto’s eye with his finger, he started explaining why he was there: he’d had to go to Bologna for a consultation-he said-and then, on the way back, it seemed a good idea to stop and have dinner between one train and the next. When we went in professor Ermanno, his wife, and his brother-in-law were sitting in front of the fire, with Yor stretched full length at their feet. But signora Regina was sitting at the table, right under the central lamp.
Inevitably the memory of my first dinner at the
magna domus
(we were still in January, I think) tends to become confused a little with memories of many other dinners I had at the Finzi-Continis’ house that same winter. But I remember, with odd exactness, what we ate that evening: a
minestra di riso in brodo e fegatini,
a
polpettone
of turkey in jelly, tongue
salmis-trata*
* Soup with rice and chicken livers, a kind of terrine of turkey in jelly, a salami of tongue served cold and in thin slices.
with black olives and spinach stalks in oil, chocolate cake, fresh fruit and dried fruit: walnuts, hazelnuts, raisins, pine seeds. I remember, besides, that almost at once, as soon as we sat down at the table, Alberto started telling the family how I had recently been thrown out of the city library, and once again I was surprised at the old people’s lack of surprise at such a thing. The comments that followed on the general situation, and on Ballola and Poledrelli, which kept coming up all through dinner, were not even particularly bitter, but elegantly sarcastic as usual, you might almost say gay. And gay, decidedly gay and pleased, was professor Ermanno’s tone when he took my arm, much later, and suggested I should in future make full, free use whenever I wished of the twenty thousand odd books they had at home, an important part of which, he told me, were concerned with Italian literature of the middle and late nineteenth century.
But what struck me most, from that first evening on, was definitely the dining-room itself: with its
art nouveau
furniture in reddish wood, its huge fireplace with a sinuous, curved, almost human mouth, its walls covered in leather, except for one entirely of glass that opened on to the dark storm in the park like the porthole of the
Nautilus:
so cosy, so sheltered, so-l would almost say-buried; so well suited to me as I was in those days, above all-I can see it now !-so well fitted to protect the kind of slow-burning coal that the heart of the young so often is.
When we went in, both Malnate and I were welcomed with great friendliness, not just by professor Ermanno, who was as kind and jolly and lively as ever, but even by signora Olga. It was she who showed us where to sit at the table. Malnate sat on her right, and I, at the other end of the table, was on her husband’s right; her brother Giulio sat on her left, between her and their old mother. And she, too, looking very handsome with her rosy cheeks, and her silky white hair thicker and more shining than ever, looked about her in an amiable, amused sort of way.
The table, with its plates, glasses and cutlery, seemed laid for a seventh guest. As Perotti went round with the tureen of soup and rice, I quietly asked professor Ermanno for whom the chair on his left was kept. And he answered, quietly too, that it was nothing, the place was “presumably” not laid for anyone (he checked the time with his large Omega wrist-watch, shook his head, sighed), being just the chair usually used by his MicOl:
“Micol mia
”-as he put it, exactly.
I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room.
In English in the original.
