The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (27 page)

But one evening in June, about half-way through the month, things took a turn for the worse.

We were sitting side by side on the steps outside the Hiitte, and, although it was already eight o’clock, we could still see. In the distance I could make out Perotti busy taking down and rolling up the tennis net; since the new red earth had come from the Romagna, he couldn’t do enough to look after the surface of the court-which was odd too, for him. Malnate was having a shower inside the
Hiitte
(we could hear him behind us, breathing noisily under the jet ofhot water); Alberto had left a little earlier with a melancholy “bye-bye”. In fact Micol and I were left alone and at once I took the chance to start up my dreary, absurd, everlasting courtship. As always, I kept trying to persuade her that she had been wrong and was still wrong in thinking it would be unsuitable for us to have any love relationship; as always I accused her (in bad faith) of lying to me when, less than a month before, she had assured me there was no-one between us. According to me there was, or at least there had been, someone in Venice during the winter.

“For the umpteenth time I tell you you’re wrong,” Micol was saying softly, “but I know it’s no good, I know you’ll be at it again tomorrow, with the same old tale. What d’you want me to say: that I’m secretly sleeping around, that I lead a double life? If that’s really what you want, I can satisfy you with it.”

“No, Micol,” I replied, just as softly, but more excitedly. “I may be all sorts of things but I’m not a masochist. If you only knew how normal, how terribly banal my longings are! Yes, laugh away if you like. But if there’s just one thing I’d like it’d be this: to hear you
swear
what you said is true, and to believe you.” “Well, I can swear it straight off. But would you believe me?”

“No.”

“All the worse for you, then!”

“Yes, of course: all the worse for me. In any case, if I
could
really believe you. . . .”

“What would you do? Let’s hear.”

“Oh, the most normal, banal things, that’s the trouble! This, for instance.”

I grabbed both her hands and began covering them with kisses and tears.

For a little she let me do it. I hid my face against her knees, and the smell ofher smooth, tender, faintly salty skin made my head reel. I kissed her there, on her legs.

“That’s enough now,” she said.

She slipped her hands out of mine and stood up.

“Ciao,
I’m cold,” she went on. “I must go indoors. Supper’ll be on the table and I’ve still got to wash and change. Come on, get up: don’t behave like a child.”

“Good-bye!” she called, turning towards the
Hiitte.
“I’m off.”

“Good-bye,” Malnate replied from inside. “Thanks.”

“Be seeing you. Coming tomorrow?”

“Don’t know. We’ll see.”

We started off in the direction of the
magna doiiius,
high and dark in the sunset summer air full of mosquitoes and bats, with the bicycle between us, and me gripping its handlebars convulsively. We were silent. A cart full ofhay, pulled by a pair ofyoked oxen, came along in the opposite direction to ours, with one of Perotti’s sons, who, as he passed, took off his cap and wished us good evening, sitting up on the hay. Even though I had accused Micol in bad faith without believing my accusation, I wanted to yell at her just the same, and tell her to stop play-acting with me. I wanted to insult her, even hit her. And then? Whatever would I get out of it?

But it was here I went wrong.

“It’s no good denying it,” I said, “because in any case I even know
who the person is.”

I had scarcely got the words out before I regretted them.

She looked at me seriously, grieved.

“Look,” she said. “What you’re expecting me to do now is dare you to spell out the name you’ve got in mind, if you’ve really got one, in large letters. But I’ve had enough. I don’t want to hear any more. There’s just one thing, now we’ve got to this point: I’d be grateful if from now on you’d be around a bit less . . . if ... well, quite honestly, if you didn’t come here quite so often. To be quite frank with you: if I wasn’t afraid the family’d start clucking over it-why, how on earth, and so on-I'd ask you to stop coming altogether: for good.”

“Forgive me,” I managed to murmur.

“No, I can’t forgive you,” she said, shaking her head. “If I did you’d start up again within three days.”

She went on to say that for some time now I hadn’t been behaving decently: either as far as I was concerned, or as far as she was. She had told me over and over, a thousand times over, that it was no use, that I mustn’t aim at any relationship between us except one of friendship and affection. But honestly: the minute I could, there I was all over her with kisses and whatnot, as if I didn’t know myself that in situations like ours nothing could be nastier or less suitable. Heavens ! Couldn’t I control myself? If we’d been physically bound by rather more than a few kisses, well, if that had been the case she might have understood my . . . have understood that she’d got under my skin, as they say. But considering the way our relationship had always been, my craze for kissing and cuddling very likely meant just one thing only: that I was essentially dry-hearted, and constitutionally unable to love properly. And then, for goodness’ sake !-what did all these sudden comings and goings mean, these nosey or tragic looks I gave her, these moody silences and sulks and fantastic insinuations-in fact the whole barefaced continuous repertory of foolishness and embarrassment? If the married rows were kept exclusively for her, when she was on her own, it wouldn’t be so bad: but for her brother and Giampi Malnate to have to watch them-no, no, and no again.

“I think you’re exaggerating about that,” I said. “Whenever have I made a scene in front of Malnate and Alberto?”

“Always, the whole time!” she retorted.

When I came back after a week’s absence-she went on-saying I’d been in Rome, for instance, and laughing, as I said it, in a nervous, crazy sort of way, for no apparent reason: did I really think Alberto and Malnate didn’t realize I was talking nonsense, that I hadn’t been anywhere near Rome, and that my fits of
Cena delle 
befe-type laughter*
* A play by the Italian author Sem Benelli. 
were all directed at her? And in our arguments, when I leaped up screeching and ranting like a man obsessed, giving everything a personal slant (Giampi’d end up getting angry some day, and he wouldn’t be entirely to blame, poor soul!), what did I think-that people didn’t realize she, and she alone, was, quite unwittingly, the cause of all my outbursts?

“I see,” I said, banging my head. “I realize you don’t want to see me any more.

“It’s not my fault. It’s you who’ve gradually become unbearable.”

“But,” I stammered after a pause, “you said I could, in fact must, come back occasionally. Didn’t you, now?

“Yes.”

“Well then, you decide. How must I arrange things so as not to go wrong? How often ought I to appear?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I should think first of all keep away for at least three weeks. Then start coming again, if you really want to: but please,
even afterwards
, not more than twice a week.”

“Tuesdays and Fridays, will that do? Like piano lessons.”

“Stupid,” she muttered, smiling in spite of herself. “You really are a stupid.”

Although, especially at first, it was terribly hard to stick to it, I made it a point of honour to obey Micol's orders scrupulously. When I got my degree on June 29th, and immediately had a warm note of congratulations from professor Ermanno, which included an invitation to dinner, I thought I should say no, I was very sorry I couldn’t. I wrote that I had a sore throat, and my father refused to let me out in the evening. But the real reason for my refusal was that only sixteen days had so far passed out of the three weeks of exile imposed on me by Micol.

It was terribly hard, and of course I hoped that sooner or later I’d have it made up to me: but vaguely, and without counting on it at all, content to obey for the moment and, through my obedience, to remain bound to her and to the paradise from which I was temporarily banished. As far as Micol was concerned, even if I’d had things to reproach her with before, I now had nothing, it was all my fault and I was the only one who needed to be forgiven. How wrong I’d been! One by one I remembered the times when, often using violence, I had managed to kiss her on the mouth, but only to think how entirely good she’d been to put up with me so long, although she’d refused me, and to feel ashamed of my satyr-like lust, which paraded as sentiment and idealism. When the three weeks had gone by, I ventured back, and from then on kept strictly to my two visits a week. But this didn’t bring Micol down from off the pedestal of purity and moral superiority I had placed her on since I went into exile. She stayed right on it, up there. And as far as I was concerned I thought myself lucky to be let in to admire the distant image, no less lovely within than without, now and then.
“Like the truth-and like it sad and lovely
. . . ”: these two lines of a poem I never finished, although written much later, immediately after the war, referred to Micol in August ’39, to the way I then saw her.

Thrown out of paradise, I did not rebel, but waited silently to be welcomed back. But I suffered for it, all the same: in anguish, some days. And it was only to lighten, somehow, the weight of this often unbearable separation and loneliness that about a week after my final disastrous talk with Micol I had the idea of visiting Malnate, and keeping up with him at least.

I knew where to find him. Like Meldolesi at one time, he lived in a district of pretentious small houses outside Porta San Benedetto, between the kennels and the industrial zone. It was very much more solitary and fashionable than it is now, since the last fifteen years have overwhelmed it in unbridled speculative building: the small two-storeyed houses, each with its own modest, pretty garden, belonged to magistrates, teachers, civil servants, white-collar workers on the town council, whom it wasn’t hard to see, on late summer afternoons through the bars of their spike-topped gates, busy watering, pruning, and weeding, in pyjamas. The owner of Malnate’s house, a certain Dr. Lalumfa, if I remember rightly, was a local magistrate, a Sicilian of about fifty, terribly thin, with a shock of grey hair, and, as soon as he noticed me standing on the pedals of my bicycle, holding on to the bars of the gate with both hands, and peering into the garden, he put down the rubber hose with which he was watering the flower-beds.

“What is it?” he asked, coming towards the gate. “Is Dr Malnate here?”

“This is where he lives. Why?”

“Is he at home?’’

“Heaven knows. Is he expecting you?”

‘‘I’m a friend ofhis. I wasjust going by and I thought I’d stop a moment to say hello.”

While we were speaking, he had covered the ten odd yards between us. I now saw only the top ofhis bony, fanatical face and his black pin-sharp eyes over the edge of the sheet-metal that bound the bars of the gate at about a man’s height. He stared at me with obvious suspicion; but the examination must have ended favourably, because almost at once the lock clicked and I was able to go inside.

“Do go along in there,” thejudge said at last, raising his skeletal arm, “along the path round the back of the house. The small door on the ground floor, that’s Dr. Malnate’s. Ring the bell. He may not be in; but my wife’ll open up, as she’s sure to be there just now, getting his bed ready for the night.”

After this he turned round and went back to his house, taking no more notice of me.

Instead of Malnate, a fleshy blonde in a dressing-gown appeared at the door Dr. Lalumia had pointed out.

“Good evening,” I said. “I was looking for Dr. Malnate.”

“He’s not back yet,” said signora Lalumia, in the friendliest way, “but he shouldn’t be long now. Nearly every evening, as soon as he leaves the factory, he goes to play tennis at the Finzi-Cortinis’s, you know, those fine people in Corso Ercole I. ... And, as I say, he ought to be here any moment. He always drops in before supper,” she smiled, shutting her eyes delightedly, “to see if there’s any post.”

I said I’d come back later, and made to pick up the bike which I had leant against the wall, beside the door. But she insisted on my waiting. She asked me in, and sat me down in an armchair, and then stood before me and told me she was from Ferrara, “thoroughbred Ferrarese”, and knew my family very well, and my mother (“your Mummy”) in particular, since “something like forty years ago” -and as she spoke she smiled, and sweetly lowered her eyelids again-they had been friends at the
Regina Elena
primary school, the one beside the church of San Giuseppe, in via Carlo Mayr. How was my mothcr?-she asked. Would I please not forget to greet her from Edvige, Edvige Santini, and she’d be sure to remember. She mentioned the danger of war, and, with a sigh and a shake of her head, the racial laws, and then, having excused herself(she’d been “without help” for a few days and had to do everything herself, including the cooking), she left me on my own.