The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (29 page)

“You’re a fine old idiot,” he scolded me, as soon as we had dashed over to the parking place to collect our bicycles. “And now
scia, gamba
:
t “Shove off, quick”: Milanese dialect.
 and just pray to that God of yours that the swine in there was only making a guess.”

This was how we spent our evenings, one after another, seeming always to congratulate ourselves for managing to talk without quarrelling the way we did when Alberto was there, and without even considering the possibility ofsimply ringing him up and asking him to come out and join us.

We had now dropped politics. As we both sat back in the certainty that France and England, whose diplomatic missions had been in Moscow for some time, would in the end come to an agreement with the U.S.S.R. (this understanding, which we thought inevitable, would save the independence of Poland and peace at the same time, and so bring about the end of the Axis pact, and the fall of Mussolini at least), we now talked nearly always of art and literature. Although he stuck to his moderate tone, and never went too far in our discussions (at any rate-he said-he had little understanding of art, it wasn’t his job), Malnate firmly rejected, quite out of hand, what I loved most: from Eliot to Montale, from Garda Lorca to Esenin. He would listen to me reciting Montale’s “Non
chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato
”* 
* “Do not ask us for the word which can define everything...” 
or fragments of Lorca’s 
Lament for Ignazio,
feeling moved, and each time hoping vainly to warm him, to bring him round to my taste. He would shake his head and say no, Montale’s 
“ci'o che non siamo, cio che non vogliamo”t
 
t "What we are not, what we do not want.” 
left him cold, that real poetry couldn’t be based on negation (heavens, let’s not drag Leopardi into it! Leopardi was quite another matter, and anyway he’d written the
Ginestra,
I mustn’t forget!), but, on the contrary, it was based on affirmation, on the
yes
which, in the final analysis, the poet
couldntfail
to utter in the face ofhostile nature and death. Even Morandi’s paintings didn’t win him over-he said-: no doubt they were very subtle and delicate, but to him they seemed too “individual”, too “subjective” and “rootless”. Fear of reality, fear of being mistaken : this, basically, was what Morandi’s still lifes expressed, his famous pictures ofbottles and flowers; and fear, even in art, is always a very bad counsellor. . . . And though I secretly cursed him, I could never answer back: the thought that the following afternoon, he, the blessed, would be seeing Alberto and Micol, and perhaps talking to them about me, was enough to remove the faintest notion of rebellion from me, and send me back into my shell.

In spite of that I chafed.

“Well, after all,” I objected one evening, “your attitude towards contemporary literature, the only living literature, isjust as radically negative as its attitude, our literature’s attitude, is towards life-which is something you won’t tolerate. Now is that fair? Your ideal poets are still Victor Hugo and Carducci: admit it.”

“And why not?” he said. “I think Carducci’s republican poems, the ones he wrote before his political con-version-or rather before he went back to his neoclassic and monarchical second childhood-should all be rediscovered. Have you re-read them lately? Try, and you’ll see.”

I replied I hadn’t re-read them, and hadn’t the slightest wish to. To me they were, and still remained, empty “fanfares” puffed up with factitious, patriotic rhetoric. Downright incomprehensible, in fact. And amusing if only for that: because they were quite incomprehensible, and therefore basically “surrealist”.

Another evening, all the same, not so much because I wanted to shine, as for some odd vague need, heaven knows quite what or why, to confess, to pour myself out, that I had been feeling for some time, I gave way to the temptation to recite one of my poems to him. I had written it on the train, coming back from Bologna after my degree thesis had been discussed, and although for some weeks I had been deluding myself that it faithfully reflected my profound desolation at the time, the horror I had inspired in myselfin those days, now, as I said it to Malnate, I gradually saw quite clearly, feeling more uneasy than dismayed, all its falseness, all its literariness. We were walking along Giovecca, at the end there near the Prospect, beyond which lay the thick country darkness, a kind of black wall. I recited slowly, making myself stress the rhythm, my voice filled with pathos in an effort to pass off my poor shop-soiled goods as genuine, and, the nearer I drew to the end, the more firmly I was convinced that my exhibition was bound to fail. But I was wrong. The moment I finished Malnate gazed at me, looking remarkably serious, and then, leaving me open-mouthed, assured me he had liked my poem a lot, a very great deal indeed. He asked me to recite it again (which I did at once); after which he declared that in his modest opinion, my “lyric”, on its own, was worth all “Montale and Ungaretti’s dreary efforts put together”. You could feel real pain, a “moral commitment” that was absolutely new and authentic. Was Malnate sincere? At least on that occasion I would say he was. At any rate he quickly learnt my verses by heart, and quoted them endlessly, saying that it was possible to catch a glimpse in them of an “opening” for contemporary Italian poetry, which was stuck on some pretty dry, stylized and “hermetic” shoals. As for me, I am not ashamed to confess that I let him talk without contradiction. I made a few feeble protests now and then in the face of his effusive praises, my heart filled with gratitude and hope that, now I come to think of it, were more touching than contemptible.

All the same, as far as Malnate’s taste in poetry was concerned, I feel bound to add that Carducci and Victor Hugo were not, in fact, his favourite authors. As an anti-fascist and a Marxist he respected them. But his real passion, as a good son of Milan, was Porta: a poet to whom, before that, I had always preferred Belli, and it was wrong- Malnate said-to compare Belli’s gloomy Counter-Reformation monotony with the varied, warm humanity of Porta.

He knew hundreds of lines by heart.

Bravo el me Baldissar! Bravo el me Nan!

Leva preu vora de vegni
a
trovamm: t'el seet mattascion porch, che maneman re on mes che no te vegnet a ciollamm?

Ah Cristo! Cristo! com hin frecc sti man!*

he would start declaiming aloud in his thick, rather raucous Milanese voice, on the night we wandered near via Sacca or via Colomba, or very slowly made our way up via delle Volte peeping through half-shut doors into lighted brothels. He knew the whole of 
Ninetta del Verzee\
by heart, and it was he who revealed it to me.

With a threatening forefinger, and many winks, and a knowing allusive expression (alluding to some remote episode of his adolescence in Milan, I supposed), he would often murmur:

No Ghittin: non sont capazz de traditt: no, sta pur franca.

Mettem minga insemma a mazz coi gingitt, e cont i s'cianca.
... t

* There’s my fine Baldassarre! There's my fine Dwarf!

High time you came to see me, too.

D'you know, you lousy old fool, it's nearly A month since you came along to f . . . ?

Ah Christ ! Christ ! How cold these hands are ! t “Ninetta of the Herb Market.” t No Ghittina: I’m not able To betray you: no, be sure of that.

Don’t go classing me with the others,

The coxcombs and the rascals . . .

Or else, sadly, bitterly, he would start up:

Paracar, che scappee de Lombardia
. . . *

emphasizing each line of the sonnet with winks, which ofcourse referred, not to Napoleon’s French, but to the fascists.

He was equally enthusiastic and committed when he quoted the poetry ofRagazzoni and ofDelio Tessa: of Tessa in particular, who nevertheless-and I didn’t fail to tell him so, once-hardly seemed to me to qualify as a “classic”, oozing twilight decadent sensibility as he did. But the fact was that anything connected with Milan and its dialect made him quite remarkably indulgent. Everything from Milan he accepted, smiling benevolently. Even literary decadentism, even fascism, had something positive about them in Milan.

He would recite :

Pensa ed opra, varda e scolta tan se viv e tant se impara; mi, quand nassi onaltra volta, nassi on gatt de portinara!

Per csempi, in Rugabella, nassi el gatt del sur Pinin . . .

. . . scartoseij de coradella, polpa e fidegh, barettin

del patron per dormigh sora .
.

*
Stones
fleeing from Lombardy, these ‘stones’ being Napoleon’s soldiers.”

t Think and work, look and listen,

The longer you live the more you learn; me, when I’m born another time,

I’m going to be born a portress’s cat!

and he would laugh to himself, his laughter full of tenderness and of nostalgia.

Of course I didn’t understand Milanese dialect perfectly, and when there was something I couldn’t follow I asked about it.

“What’s Rugabella, Giampi?” I asked one evening. “I’ve been to Milan, it’s true, but I can’t say I really know it. Can you believe it? I get my bearings there rather worse than anywhere else: worse than in Venice, even.”

“Butfor heaven’s sake !”he said, oddly emphatic about it. “Why, it’s so clear, so rational! I can’t sec how you dare compare it with a damp old latrine like Venice!”

And then calming down at once, he explained that Rugabella was a road: the old street not far from the cathedral where he was born, where his parents still lived, and where, in a few months, perhaps before the end of the year (always presupposing the head office in Milan didn’t turn down his application for a transfer) he hoped to be able to return and live. Because, let’s get it clear-he explained-Ferrara was a very fine little town, lively and interesting in all sorts of ways, including politically. In fact he thought the experience gained in his two years there had been important, not to say fundamental. But home and mother-well, they were always home and mother, and as for the sky of Lombardy,
“cosi hello quando e hello”;*
there was none other in the world, at least to him, that began to compare with it.

For instance, in Rugabella, be born the cat of signor Pinin . . .

. . . bags of offal, lights and liver and the master’s cap to snooze upon . . .

* “So fine when it is fine”: Manzoni,
The Betrothed.

As I have said already, when the three weeks of exile were over I began going to the Finzi-Continis’ every Tuesday and Friday. But not knowing how to spend my Sundays (even if I had wanted to take up with old school friends again, Nino Bottecchiari or Otello Forti, or with more recent friends from the university, whom I had met during the last few years at Bologna, I could not have done so: they were all away on holiday), I allowed myself an occasional visit, apart from that, on Sundays as well. And Micol let it pass, and never told me to stick to the letter of our agreement.

We were very polite to each other, rather too much so, actually. Conscious that we were on a fairly stablelooking but in fact precarious footing, we were careful not to spoil things, to keep in a neutral zone of mutual respect, where excessive familiarity was as much out of place as excessive coldness. When Alberto felt like playing, and this grew progressively rarer, I was quite ready to make a fourth, but if possible I avoided partnering Micol. As a rule, though, I was not even dressed for tennis. I preferred to umpire the long relentless singles between Micol and Malnate, or else, sitting under the big umbrella beside the court, keep Alberto company.

The obvious deterioration in Alberto’s health gnawed at me horribly, growing gradually into another secret torment, the reason for an anxiety perhaps even sharper and more painful than the thought of Micol, however constant. I would gaze at his face, grown longer now with his thinness, and then watch the way his breathing, down his thickened neck, seemed every day more laboured; and my heart would contract with hidden anguish. There were times when I would have given anything at all to see him well again.

“Why don’t you go away for a bit?” I asked him one day.

He turned and stared at me.

“Do I look run down?”

“Well no, not exactly run down. . . . Just a bit thinner, I’d say. Does this heat bother you?”

“Yes, a lot,” he panted.

He raised his arms and took a long breath.

“My dear chap, I’ve been feeling pretty awful for a long time. Go away . . . but where?”

“I think the mountains would do you good. What does your uncle say? Has he had a look at you?”

“Oh yes. Uncle Giulio guarantees there's nothing wrong; and that must be true, don’t you think? Else he’d have prescribed something for me. . . . According to him, in fact, I can perfectly well play all the tennis I like. And what else? It’s obviously the heat that’s dragged me down like this. And then I’m not eating a thing, or practically nothing.”