The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (32 page)

I had hung my head again, and was staring at my hands lying open on my knees.

“You’ll get over it,” he went on, “you’ll get over it : and very much sooner than you think. Of course I’m sorry; I can imagine what you’re feeling just now. But d’you know, I envy you just a little bit as well? If you want to understand, really understand the way things are in this world, you’ve got to die at least once. And as that’s the law, it’s better to die while you’re young, when you’ve still got time to pull yourself up and start again.. .. Understanding when you’re old is ugly, very much uglier. What can you do? There’s no time to start from scratch, and our generation’s taken so many knocks. In any case, you’re so young, praise heaven! You’ll see, in a few months you won’t think it’s true you went through all this. You may even be glad about it. . . . You’ll feel richer, or ... maturer, or . . .”

“Let’ s hope so,” I murmured.

“I’m so glad we had this out, so glad to have this weight off my mind. . . . And now I’ve got just one last recommendation. May I?”

I nodded.

“Don’t go to their house any more. Start studying again, take something up, start giving private lessons, say, I’ve heard there’s a great demand for them . . . and don’t go there again. It’s more manly, apart from everything else.”

He was right. Apart from everything else it was more manly.

‘‘I’ll try,” I said, looking up again. “I’ll do all I can to stick to it.”

“That’ s the way!”

He looked at the clock.

“Now go and get some sleep,” he said, “because you need it. And I’ll try shutting my eyes a minute too.”

I got up and leant over him for a kiss, but the kiss we exchanged turned into a long embrace, silent, and very tender.

That was the way I gave Micol up.

The following evening, keeping the promise I had made my father, I kept away from Malnate; and the day after that, a Friday, I didn’t go to the Finzi-Continis’s. A week went by, that way, the first without my seeing anyone, either Malnate or the others. Luckily no one sought me out, which certainly helped ; otherwise I would very probably not have stuck it, and would have let myself be drawn back again.

Ten days after our last meeting, though, about the 25th of the month, Malnate rang me up. He had never done so before, and as I had not answered the telephone myself, I was tempted to say I was out. But I changed my mind at once. I already felt strong enough, if not to see him, at least to talk to him.

“Are you all right?” he said. “You really dumped me, didn’t you?”

“I’ve been away.”

“Where to? Florence? Rome?” he asked, not without a hint of irony.

‘‘A bit farther this time,’’ I replied, already regretting the over-pathetic expression.

“Bon.
I don’t want to pry. Well now, are we going to meet?”

I said I couldn’t that evening, but the next I’d almost 282

certainly come round to him at the usual time. But he wasn’t to wait for me-l went on-if he saw I was late. In that case we’d meet at
Giovanni's.
Wasn’t that where he’d be having supper?

“Very likely,” he said, drily. And then: “Have you heard the news?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What a mess! Do come along, and we’ll talk about everything.”

“So long then,” I said gently.

“So long. ”

And he hung up.

The following evening as soon as supper was over I cycled to within a hundred yards of the restaurant. All I wanted was to check up that Malnate was there, and in fact, after finding that he actually was (he was sitting as usual at a table out of doors, in his everlasting cream-coloured jacket), instead ofjoining him, I turned away, and went up on to one of the Castle’s three drawbridges, the one exactly opposite the
Giovanni.
This way, I calculated, I could watch him very much better, without the danger of being noticed. And so it was. Resting my chest against the stone edge of the parapet, that reached about the height of my heart, I watched him as he ate. I looked down at him and at the rows of other customers with the wall behind them, and at the waiters in their white jackets moving fast among the tables, and, strung up there in the darkness as I was, above the glassy water of the moat, I almost felt I was in the theatre, secretly watching an agreeable, meaningless play. Malnate had now got to the fruit. He picked at a large bunch of grapes, eating one grape after another, and every now and then, obviously expecting to see me, turned his head sharply to left and right. As he did so the lenses of his thick spectacles (those “great ugly specs”, as Micol called them) glittered: shuddering, nervous. . . . When he had finished the grapes, he signalled to a waiter and spoke to him for a minute. I thought he had asked for the bill; and was getting ready to go when I saw the waiter coming back with a cup of coffee. Malnate gulped it down all at once. Then, from one of the two breast pockets ofhis jacket, he took out something very small: a notebook, in which he started writing in pencil. What the hell was he writing?— smiled. Poetry as well? And here I left him, busily writing in the notebook, from which, at infrequent intervals, he raised his head to turn and look left and right, or else up at the starry sky, as if searching for inspiration and ideas.

For the next few evenings I roamed the streets haphazardly, watching everything, drawn by everything quite impartially: by the great newspaper headlines plastered over the booths in the middle of town, written in huge block capitals, underlined in red ink; by the photographs of films and variety shows stuck up by the cinema entrances; by the shady groups of drunks who hung about right in the middle of the old city’s alleyways; by the number-plates of cars lined up in piazza del Duomo ; and by the odd variety coming out of brothels, or gradually emerging from the dark brushwood of the Montagnone to have ices, beer or fizzy drinks at the zinc counter of a kiosk lately set up on the slope of San Tomaso, at the end ofvia Scandiana. One night, about eleven, I found myself near piazza Travaglio, peering into the half-darkness of the famous
caffe Shanghai,
used almost exclusively by prostitutes off the street and workmen from Borgo San Luca not far away; then, immediately afterwards, on the top of the bastion overlooking it, I stood watching a feeble shooting match between two youths, played out under the tough gaze ofthe Tuscan girl who had admired Malnate. I stayed there, holding off, without saying a word, without even getting off my bike: and at one point the Tuscan girl spoke to me directly: “Hey, why don’t you come up and have a try yourself?” she said. “Be brave now, don’t be scared! Show these softies what you can do.”

“No thanks,” I replied politely.

“No thanks,” she repeated. “God, the blokes they turn out nowadays! Where’s your friend? Now that’s what I call a bloke! Tell me now: where’ve you hidden him ? ”

I said nothing, and she burst out laughing.

“Poor pet!” she said, pityingly. “Run along home now or Dad’ll be smacking you. Run along to bye-byes now, there’s a good boy!”

About midnight the following night, without knowing why, or what I was really looking for, I was on the opposite side of town, pedalling along the unpaved lane that ran smoothly, curving slightly round the inside of the Wall of the Angels. The moon was full and splendid: so bright and luminous, in the perfectly clear sky, that there was no point in using a lamp. I pedalled slowly along. Lying on the grass, under the trees, I kept seeing lovers, and mechanically counted the couples, one by one. Some tossed about halfnaked, one over the other, intertwined, others already lay apart, hand in hand ; others, clasped together, but motionless, seemed asleep. I counted more than thirty couples, as I passed. And although I sometimes went so near them that I brushed them with my wheel, no one ever seemed to notice my silent presence there. I felt, and was, a kind of strange fleeting ghost: at once full of life and of death; of passion, and of detached pity.

When I got level with Barchetto del Duca I stopped. I got off my bike, leant it against a tree trunk, and for a few minutes, facing the still, silvery park spread before me, I stayed there watching. I was thinking of nothing very precisely but of all kinds of things, one after the other, without pausing over any one of them in particular. I looked, and listened to the immense, thin cry of crickets and frogs, and was myself surprised at the slightly embarrassed smile that came to my lips. “Well, here we are,” I murmured, not knowing what to do or what I had come to do. I was filled with a vague feeling of how pointless all commemorations are.

I started walking along the edge of the grassy slope, my eyes fixed on the
magna domus.
All the lights were out over there, and although Micol’s bedroom windows faced south, so that I couldn’t see them, I was quite certain, for some unknown reason, that no light was coming from them either. When I got exactly above the point in the garden wall that was “sacred”, as Micol said, “au
vert paradis des amours enfantines
”, I suddenly had an idea. Suppose I were to creep into the park, over the wall? As a boy, that far-off June afternoon, I hadn’t dared to, I’d been frightened. But now? What on earth was there to be frightened of now?

I glanced round quickly, and a moment later I was at the foot of the wall, suddenly finding, in the sultry shadows, the same ten-year-old smell of nettles and dung. But the wall wasn’t the same at all, it had changed. Perhaps because it was ten years older (I too was ten years older, and ten years taller and stronger) it seemed to me neither as high nor as hopeless as I remembered it. After my first unsuccessful effort I lit a match. There were all the footholds I needed, and even a big rusty nail still sticking out from the wall. I made a second attempt, and reached it at once; then, grabbing it, I easily pulled myself up to the top by my arms.

As soon as I was sitting there, with my legs dangling over on the far side, the first thing I noticed was a ladder leaning against the wall below me. I wasn’t surprised; amused, if anything. “Look at that,” I said. “There’s even a ladder.” All the same, before starting to go down it I turned round a moment towards the Wall of the Angels. The bicycle was still there, leaning against the trunk of the lime tree, where I had left it. It was an old bike, a bone-shaker that wouldn’t really tempt anyone.

Soon, with the ladder’s help, I reached the ground, and, leaving the path that ran inside the garden wall, I immediately cut across the field strewn with fruit trees, meaning to reach the main drive at a point more or less equidistant from Perotti’s house and the girder bridge over the Panfilio canal. I trampled the grass noiselessly, my mind still quite empty: seized by what might have been a scruple now and then, admittedly, but shrugging off all anxieties before they had time to get established. How beautiful Barchetto del Duca was at night, I said to myself, how sweetly it lay in the moonlight! I wasn’t looking for anything, among those milky shadows, in that sea of milk and silver. No one, however much surprised to find me there, could really have blamed me a great deal. After all, when you came to think of it, I even had a bit of a right to, now. . . .

I left the drive, crossed the bridge over the canal, then, turning left, soon reached the tennis court clearing. It was perfectly true. Professor Ermanno had kept his promise. The wire-netting round it had been taken down and lay in ajumbled luminescent heap at the side of the court, on the opposite side to the one where the audience’s cane chairs and deck-chairs usually stood in a row. More than that: the work of widening the space round the tennis court had already begun, and on all four sides a strip was being taken from the surrounding meadow, at least three yards on the sidelines and five at the ends. Alberto was ill, seriously ill. But they had somehow, even in
that
way, got to hide how serious his illness was! Quite right, too, I thought approvingly, and went on.

I came out into the open, meaning to make a wide turn round the clearing, and wasn’t surprised, when I was already a long way from the tennis court, to see Yor’s stout familiar outline suddenly trotting towards me from the
Hiitte.
I stood still and waited for him, and when he was about ten yards away he stopped as well. “Yor,” I called in a muffled voice, “Yor !” Obviously he recognized me. His tail gave me a brief, pacific wag of greeting, then he turned slowly back the way he came.

Every now and then he turned, as if to make sure I was following. And I didn’t follow him, or rather, although I was drawing nearer the
Hutte,
I never left the far end of the clearing. I was walking about twenty yards from the great dark trees curving round in that part of the park, and looking to my left all the while. The moon was now behind me. The clearing, the tennis court, the
magna domus,
a sightless buttress, and then, over at the end, hanging above the leafy tops of the apple, fig, pear and plum trees, the embankment of the Wall of the Angels: all this looked clear and definite, as if in relief, in a light that was better than daylight.

I carried on that way, and then realized I was only a few steps from the
Hiitte:
not the front of it, the side looking out at the tennis court, but behind, between the trunks of the young firs and larches on to which it backed. Here I stopped. I stared at the rough black shape of the
Hiitte,
against the light, suddenly uncertain, no longer knowing where to go, where to make for.