The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (20 page)

Professor Ermanno had not deceived me. It was quite true that among the twenty thousand odd books in the house, many of them scientific, or historical, or on various learned subjects-most of these in German-there were several hundred on Italian literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. As far as Carducci’s circle at the end of the century was concerned, in the many years he taught at Bologna, there was pretty well everything: verse and prose notjust by the Master himself, but by Panzacchi, Severino Ferrari, Lorenzo Stecchetti, Ugo Brilli, Guido Mazzoni, the young Pascoli, the young Pan-zini, and the very young Valgimigli: first editions, mostly, almost all of them signed copies presented to baroness Josette Artom di Susegana. Collected in three glass-fronted bookshelves that stood on their own, taking up the entire wall of an enormous first-floor room next to professor Ermanno’s own study, and carefully catalogued, there was not the smallest doubt that any public library, including the
Archiginnasio
at Bologna, would have coveted such a prize. Even the almost unobtainable little volumes of Acri’s lyrical prose were there: Acri, the famous translator of Plato I had known till then only as a translator: not quite as “pi”, then, as Meldolesi would have had us believe in the fifth form-he’d been a pupil of Acri’s, too-since his inscriptions to Alberto and Micol’s grandmother showed altogether more gallantry than the others, more masculine awareness of the haughty beauty to whom they were addressed.

With a complete specialized library at my disposal, and every convenience in using it, and, apart from that, strangely eager to be there each morning, in the large, warm, silent room lit by three tall windows with red and white striped pelmets, and a billiard table in the middle covered with a grey cloth, I completed my thesis on Panzacchi in the two and a half months that followed. Had I really wanted to, I could probably have finished it sooner. But did I really want to? Or was I not trying to hang on as long as possible to the right to turn up at the Finzi-Continis’ in the mornings 
as well?
The fact is, anyway, that about the middle of March (Micol had got her degree, meantime, we heard: with top marks), I still dung numbly to my poor morning privilege of using the house she insisted on steering clear of, heaven only knew why. We were only a few days from the Christian Easter, which that year almost coincided with
Pesach,
the Jewish paschal feast. Although spring was pretty well upon us, a week before it had snowed amazingly heavily, and then had grown intensely cold again. It looked almost as if winter were reluctant to go; and I too, my heart a dark, mysterious pool of fear, clung to the small desk professor Ermanno had had brought into the billiard room in January, and put under the middle window for me, as if by doing so I could stop the inexorable march of time. I would get up, go to the window, and look down into the park. Buried under a thick blanket of snow, Barchetto del Duca stretched before me like an ice landscape in a Nordic saga. Sometimes I surprised myself hoping for just that: that the snow and ice would never melt, that they would last for ever.

For two and a halfmonths my days had been almost exactly the same. Punctual as a clerk, I left home in the biting cold at half-past eight, nearly always on my bicycle but sometimes on foot; after twenty minutes at the most I was ringing at the gate at the end of Corso Ercole I d’Este; then I crossed the park, over which, around February, hung the delicate scent ofthe yellow calicanthus ; at nine I was already at work in the billiard room, where I stayed until one o’clock, and to which I returned in the afternoon about three; later, about six, I went on to Alberto’s, sure of finding Mal-nate there as well: and often, as I have said, we were both asked to dinner. In fact it soon became so normal for me to stay out for dinner that I didn’t even ring up home to warn them not to wait for me. I might say to my mother as I left the house: “I think I’ll be staying there for dinner.” There: and I had no need to say anything more precise.

For hours and hours I worked away, without a soul turning up, except Perotti at about eleven o’clock, carrying a cup of coffee on a silver tray. This coffee at eleven became a daily rite almost at once, a habit we had picked up which it wasn’t worth wasting words on. What Perotti talked about as he waited for me to finish sipping the coffee was the “running” of the house, which he felt had seriously deteriorated in the overlong absence of the “signorina”, who of course had to become a teacher, although . . . (and his “although”, accompanied by a dubious grimace, might allude to all sorts of things: to the fact that his bosses, lucky people, had absolutely no need to earn their living; or to the racial laws, which in any case would make our degrees worth only the paper they were written on, without the smallest practical use) . . . but this didn’t exempt her from coming home on, say, alternate weeks, as without her the house was quickly going “a
remengo"*
* “To rack and ruin”: Venetian dialect.
.
With me, Perotti always found a way of complaining about the family. He bit his lips, and winked, and shook his head as signs of mistrust and disapproval. When he mentioned signora Olga he went so far as to tap his forehead with his blunt first finger. I took no notice, of course, and firmly rejected his repeated invitations to a low kind of complicity that not only disgusted but offended me; so that soon, in the face of my silences and cold smiles, Perotti could do nothing but go, and leave me alone again.

One day his younger daughter Dirce turned up instead of him. She too waited beside the desk for me to finish drinking the coffee. I drank it and glanced furtively at her.

“What’s your name?” I asked her, when I gave back the empty cup; my heart had started beating fast, meantime.

“Dirce,” she smiled, and coloured violently.

She was wearing her usual thick blue linen overall, that smelt oddly of the nursery. Avoiding my eyes, that were trying to meet hers, she made off And a moment later I was already ashamed of what had happened (but what had happened, anyway?), as if it had been the vilest, the most sordid betrayal.

Of the family, the only one who appeared now and then was professor Ermanno. He would open his study door at the end of the room so cautiously, and then tiptoe across the room, that generally I noticed him only when he was right beside me, bending respectfully over the papers and books I had before me.

“How’s it going?” he would ask, looking pleased. “You look as if you’re getting on at a spanking pace!”

I would make a move to get up.

“No, no, carry on with your work,” he would say.

Im just going.

And, in fact, he usually never stayed more than five minutes, during which time he always found a way of showing me how much he liked and admired the tenacity with which I worked. He looked at me with glowing, shining eyes: as if expecting heaven knows what from me, and from my future as a man ofletters; as if he were counting on me to fulfil some secret plan of his, that transcended not only him but me as well. . . . And I remember that this attitude of his towards me, although it flattered me, saddened me a little too. Why on earth didn’t he expect as much from Alberto -I wondered-who was his own son, after all? Why had he accepted without protest or regret-in fact he never complained of it-that Alberto had given up taking his degree? And what about Micol? In Venice, Micol was doing exactly the same as I was: finishing a thesis. And yet he never mentioned Micol without sighing; as if saying: “She’s a girl, and women ought to stick to the house, not to literature!” But was I really to believe him?

One morning, though, he lingered on and talked for rather longer than usual. Gradually he got round to Carducci’s letters again and to his own “little works” on the Venetian subjects: all stuff-he said, indicating his study behind me-which he kept “in there”. He smiled mysteriously, as he did so, looking at me slyly, invitingly. It was clear that he wanted to take me “in there”, and at the same time wanted me to be the one to suggest being taken.

As soon as I realized what he wanted, I hastened to do it. So we went into his study, which was not much smaller than the billiard room, but looked smaller, in fact seemed actually cramped by an incredible collection of the most dissimilar things.

Books, to start off with: there were a very great many in the study as well: literary and scientific works -mathematics, physics, economics, agriculture, medicine, astronomy-all jumbled up; and books on the history of the country, ofFerrara or Venice, mixed up with others on “Jewish antiquities”. They were crowded any old how into the usual glass-fronted bookcases, quite at random, taking up most of the large walnut table over which very likely only the top of professor Ermanno's cap emerged when he sat down; they were piled perilously on the chairs, and even scattered about the floor in heaps. Then there was a large globe, a lectern, a microscope, halfa dozen barometers, a steel strong-box painted dark red, a small white bed, ofthekind you find in a doctor’s surgery, several hourglasses of various sizes, a brass kettledrum, a small upright German piano with two metronomes on it shut up in their pyramid-shaped cases, and all kinds of other objects mysterious to me, which I cannot remember, giving the place an air of Dr. Faustus that professor Ermanno was the first to smile at and apologize for, as if it were a completely personal and private weakness, a remnant of his youthful crazes. I forgot to say, though, that, unlike almost every other room in the house, which was overloaded with pictures, here I saw only a single one; an enormous life-size portrait by Len-bach, hanging like an altar-piece on the wall opposite his table. The magnificent standing figure, blonde and bare shouldered, with a fan in her gloved hand, and the silk train of her white dress brought forward to emphasize the length of her legs and the fullness of her figure, was obviously none other than baroness Josette Artom di Susegana. With that marble brow, those eyes, those scornful lips, that bosom, she really looked a queen. His mother’s portrait was the one thing, out of everything in his study, that professor Ermanno never smiled at: either that morning, or later,

That same morning, anyway, I was at last presented with the two Venetian pamphlets. In one of them, professor Ermanno explained to me, all the inscriptions from the Jewish cemetery at the Lido were collected and translated. The other dealt with a Jewish poetess who lived in Venice in the first half of the seventeenth century, and was as well known in her own day as now, “alas”, she was forgotten. She was called Sarah Enriquez (or Enriques) Avigdor. For many years she had held an important literary salon in her house in Ghetto Vecchio, and her visitors included not only Leone da Modena, the learned rabbi who was half-Ferrarese and half-Venetian, but many of the most important men ofletters of the time, and not only Italians, either. She wrote a great many “excellent” sonnets, which still awaited the person capable of championing their beauty; for over four years she corresponded brilliantly with the celebrated Ansaldo Ceba, a Genoese patrician who wrote an epic poem on Queen Esther, and had the notion of converting her to Catholicism, though in the end, seeing his efforts were hopeless, he had to give up the idea. A great woman, in fact: a credit and an honour to ItalianJewry in the full spate of the Counter Reformation, and in a way part of “the family”-professor Ermanno went on, as he sat down to write a short inscription to me-as it seemed that his wife, on her mother’s side, was descended from her.

He got up, came round the table, took my arm, and led me over to the window.

But there was just one thing-he went on, lowering his voice as if afraid someone might hear-which he felt he should warn me about. If, in the future, I happened to have anything to do with this Sarah Enriquez (or Enriques) Avigdor myself-a subject that deserved far more profound and careful study than he had managed to give it in his youth-at a certain point, quite fatally, I would have to come up against certain dissident . . . discordant . . . voices, in fact with the writings ofvarious third-rate literary men, mostly contemporaries of the poetess (libellous writers fairly bursting with envy and anti-semitism), who tried to insinuate that not all the sonnets signed by her, and not even all the letters she wrote to Ceba, were . . . how could he put it? ... all her own work. Well now, when he wrote his essay, he hadn’t, ofcourse, been able to help knowing of the existence of these rumours, and in fact, as I’d see, he had faithfully set them down; all the same. . . .

He stopped, to stare into my face, doubtful of my reactions.

All the same-he went on-if I, “at some later date”, thought . . . uhm . . . decided to attempt a revaluation ... a revision ... he would advise me straight away not to take these malicious suggestions too seriously. Picturesque and even amusing they might be, but they were quite beside the point. What, after all, was the business of a good historian? His ideal, certainly, was to get at the truth, but in doing so he must never lose his sense of what was suitable andjust. Didn’t I agree? I nodded in agreement, and, relieved, he patted me lightly on the back with the palm ofhis hand.

Having done this he drew away from me, crossed the room, round-shoulderedly as ever, and bent over to fiddle with a strong-box, which he opened, finally bringing out a trinket-box covered in blue velvet.

He turned and came back to the window, all smiles, and even before he opened the casket he said yes, he’d guessed that I’d guessed: inside it were the famous letters from Carducci. There were fifteen of them: and perhaps-he went on-I shouldn’t find all of them of very great interest, since a good five dealt with the single subject of a certain
salama da suge
“from our own property”, which the poet had been given as a present, and seemed to have highly appreciated. All the same I would find one among them that would certainly strike me: a letter written in the autumn of’75, that is when the crisis of the Italian Right was already beginning to appear on the horizon. In the autumn of ’75 Carducci’s political position was as follows: as a democrat, as a republican, and a revolutionary, he declared he could line himself up only with the left of Agostino Depretis. On the other hand the man he called a “rough wine-merchant from Stradello” and the “rabble” that were his friends seemed to him vulgar people, “nobodies”. They’d never be in a position to restore Italy to her true mission, to make her a great Nation, worthy of its ancient Fathers. . . .