The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (33 page)

“What shall I do?” I said softly, perplexedly. “What shall I do?”

I kept staring at the
Hutte,
and was thinking now-without my heart beating any faster at the thought, taking it in quite indifferently, as stagnant water lets the light play over it-thinking that yes, suppose after all it was here, to Micol, that Giampi Malnate came every night after leaving me at my own front door (why not? wasn’t that why he always shaved so carefully before coming out to supper with me?): well then, if that was so, the tennis court changing rooms might be a splendid hide-out, for them.

Why yes-I went on, quietly working it out in a kind of quick inner whisper-why of course. How could I have been so blind? He went around with me just to get through the evening till it was late; then, having put me to bed, as it were, he came dashing on his bike to her, waiting for him in the garden, ofcourse. But of course. Now I realized what his gesture in the brothel had really meant. Oh well: making love every night, or nearly, is all very fine, but the time soon comes when you start missing your mother, the skies ofLom-bardy, etc. . . . And what about the ladder, there against the garden wall ? It could only have been Micol who put it there, in
that
particular place.

I was clear-eyed, calm, tranquil. As in a game of
patience, every piece fitted in, the whole thing worked out perfectly.

Micol, of course. With Giampi Malnate. With her sick brother’s closest friend. Hidden from him and all the others at home, parents, relations, and servants, always at night. In the Hiitte as a rule, but perhaps some nights up there in her bedroom, in the room where the lattimi were. Was it really hidden? Or were the others, as always, pretending not to see, letting things slide, in fact deep inside them trying to help, since basically it is right and human for a girl of twenty-three who cannot or will not marry to have what nature entitles her to, just the same. They even pretended not to see Alberto’s illness, in that house. It was their system.

I strained my ears. Absolute silence.

What about Yor, though? Where had Yor gone!

I tiptoed a few steps towards the HUtte.

“Yor!” I cried loudly.

But then, as if in answer, through the night air, from very far away came a plaintive, sad, almost human sound. I recognized it at once: it was the old, dear voice of the piazza clock striking the hours and the quarters. What was it saying? It was saying that I was very late once more, that I was foolish and wicked to keep tormenting my father, who was sure to be worried, that night like all the other nights, because I still wasn’t home, and so couldn’t sleep: and that at last it was time for me to put his mind at rest. Properly. For good.

“A fine novel,” I grinned, shaking my head as if before an incorrigible child.

And I turned my back on the Hiitte and went off through the trees, in the opposite direction.

____

1

Where and what have you been up to, the pair of you?”: Ferrarese dialect.

t The pocket money which parents give their children on Saturdays: Ferrarese dialect.

My story with Micol Finzi-Contini ends here.

And so this narrative ought to end now, since all I might add would no longer concern her, but, if there was anything to add, only myself.

I already said, at the beginning, what her fate and that ofher family was.

Alberto died of malignant lymphogranuloma before the others, in ’42, dying so slowly that, in spite of the deep furrow dug through the midst of it by the racial laws, the whole of Ferrara, from a distance, was affected by it. He choked. Oxygen was needed to help him breathe, and in ever-increasing amounts. And as there was a great shortage of it in Ferrara, because of the war, towards the end his family cornered the market in gas cylinders over the whole countryside, sending people to buy them at any price in Bologna, Ravenna, Rimini, Parma, Piacenza . . . .

The others, in September ’43, were taken by the repubblichim* The Italian expeditionary force in Russia.  After a short stay in the prison at via Piangipane, they were sent to the concentration camp at Fossoli, near Carpi, the following November, and thence to Germany. As far as I was concerned, though, during the four years between the summer of’ 39 and the autumn of ’43 I never saw any of them. Not even * The fascists of Mussolini's Republic.

Micol. At Alberto’s funeral, behind the windows of the old Dilambda, adapted to run on methane gas, that followed the funeral procession at walking speed and afterwards, as soon as the hearse had gone inside the gateway at the end of via Montebello, turned back at once, I thought I made out her ash-blonde hair a moment. That was all. Even in a town as small as Ferrara people can perfectly well vanish from one another’s sight for years and years if they want to, and live together like the dead.

As for Malnate, who was called to Milan in November ’39 (he had tried ringing me up in September, but without result; he had even written me a letter . . .), I never saw him again either, after August of that year. Poor Giampi. He believed-yes, truly believed !-in the brave Lombard and communist future that smiled at him, then, from beyond the darkness of the coming war: a distant future, he admitted, but one that was certain, couldn’t fail. But what does the heart really know? If I think of him, setting off for the Russian front with the C.S.I.R.* in ’41, never to return, I always remember vividly the way Micol reacted every time he started to “catechize” us, between games of tennis. He spoke in his low, calm, rumbling voice; but Micol, unlike me, never took much notice. She never stopped answering back, prodding him, badgering him.

“But whose side are you on, girl? The fascists’?” I remember him asking her one day, shaking his big sweaty head. He couldn’t understand.

So what was there between the pair of them? Nothing? Who can tell.

The fact is that, as if foreseeing her own coming death, her own and that of her whole family, Micol kept telling Malnate that she cared nothing for his democratic, social future, that she abhorred the future in itself, far, far preferring “/e
vierge, le vivace et
le
bel anjourd’hui
”, and the past even more, the dear, the sweet, the pious past.

And as these, I know, were only words, the usual desperate, deceptive words that only a real kiss would have stopped her uttering: let them, just these and no others, seal the small amount the heart has managed to remember.

Born in Bologna in 1916 of a Ferrarese family, Giorgio Bassani spent the first twenty-seven years of his life in Ferrara, the scene of this novel.

He was a founder of the Action Party in 1942, was imprisoned and was freed after the fall of Mussolini. From its founding in 1948 until 1960, Bassani was an editor ofthe international review
botteghe oscure. 
For many years he was an editor for a Milanese publisher, where he brought out, among other books, 
the leopard,
and taught history of the theatre at the Italian National Academy for Dramatic Arts. He is now one of the two vice-presidents of Radiotele-visione ltaliana.

Bassani has written three novels:
gli occhiali d’oro
(
the gold-rimmed spectacles
), which appeared in English in 1960;
il giardino dei finzi-CONTINI
(
the GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS); 
and, most recently,
dietro la porta.
He has also written a book oflong short stories,
le storie fer-raresi,
and a collection of poems,
l’ alba ai vetri, 
as well as essays and literary criticism which have not yet been collected into a volume.

In 1956 he won the Strega Prize with
le storie 
FERRARESI. THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS achieved the greatest popular success of any Italian book in recent years, and won the 1962 Viareggio Prize.