The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (6 page)

Slithering down the grassy slope, I ended up at the bottom of the garden wall. Although it was shady-a shade that stank high of stinging nettles and dung-it was hotter down there. And now she looked at me from above, her blonde head in the sun, as calm as if ours were not a casual, absolutely chance meeting, but as if, since we were small, we had met there more often than you could count.

“You’re fussing,” she said. “What does it matter, having to take an exam again in October?”

Obviously shewas teasing me, and even despising me a little. It was pretty much what you might expect, after all, to happen to someone like me, the son ofsuch commonplace, such “assimilated” parents: a semi-goi, in fact. What right had I to make such a fuss?

“I think you’ve got some rather funny ideas,” I answered.

“Have I?” she said, and grinned. “Then will youjust tell me, please, why you haven’t been home for lunch today.”

“How d’you know that?” I let slip.

“Aha, our spies told us. We’ve got our network, you know.”

It was Meldolesi, I thought, it couldn’t be anyone else (and in fact I was right). But what did it matter? Suddenly I realized that this business of my failure had slipped into second place, a childish matter that would settle itself,

“I say, how d’you manage to stay up there?” I asked. “Like at a window.”

“I’m standing on my dear old ladder,” she said, accentuating the syllables of“my dear old” in her usual possessive way.

A loud barking arose at this point from beyond the wall. Micol turned her head and glanced over her left shoulder with a mixture ofboredom and affection. She pulled a face at the dog, then turned to look at me.

“Bother,” she remarked calmly. “That’s Yor.”

“What breed is he?”

“He’s a Great Dane. He’s only a year old but he practically weighs a ton. He’s always trailing after me. I often try and cover up my tracks, but he always finds me after a bit, you can count on that. It’s
ghastly
.”

Then, as if following straight on:

“Would you like me to let you in?” she said. “If you like, I’ll show you what to do right away.”

How many years have gone by since that remote June afternoon? Over thirty. And yet, if I shut my eyes, Micol Finzi-Contini is still there, looking over the garden wall, watching me, talking to me. She was little more than a child in 1929, a thin fair thirteen-year-old with large light magnetic eyes, and I a stuck-up, dandified, extremely middle-class brat in short trousers, whom the first whiff of trouble at school was enough to throw into the most childish despair. We stared at each other. Above her the sky was blue, all of a piece, a warm, already summer sky without a trace of cloud. Nothing could change it, and nothing has, in fact, changed it, at least m my memory.

“Well, d’you want to or don’t you?” said Micol.

“I ... I’m not sure ...” I started to say, pointing to the wall. “It seems terribly high to me.”

“Because you haven’t seen it properly,” she retorted impatiently. “Look there, and there, and there,” and she pointed to make me see. “There are masses of notches, and even a nail up here, at the top. I stuck it in myself.”

“Yes, there are footholds all right,” I murmured uncertainly, “but . . .”

“Footholds!” she broke in at once, and burst out laughing, “I call them notches.”

“Well, you’re wrong, because they’re called footholds,” I said, acid and obstinate. “Anyone can see you’ve never been up a mountain.”

I have always suffered from dizziness, since I was a child, and, although there was nothing to it, the climb bothered me. When I was a child and my mother, carrying Ernesto (Fanny was not yet born), took me on to the Montagnone, and sat down on the big grassy space opposite via Scandiana, from the top of which you could make out the roof of our house, only just distinguishable in the sea of roofs around the great hulk of the church of Santa Maria in Vado, I was, I remember, always very scared when I escaped my mother’s vigilance and went over to the parapet that surrounded the field on the side of the open country, peering over into a gulf ninety feet deep. Someone was nearly always going up or down those sheer, dizzying walls: young labourers, peasants, bricklayers, each with a bike across his shoulders; and old men too, whiskery fishermen after frogs and catfish, loaded with rods and baskets: all of them from Quacchio, Ponte della Gradella, Coccomaro, Coccomarino, and Focomorto, and all in a hurry, so that instead of going through Porta San Giorgio or Porta San Giovanni (because in those days the bastions were still all of a piece on that side, with nowhere you could get through for at least five kilometres), they took instead what they called the Wall road. If they came out of town, having crossed the field, they passed quite near me without looking my way, then climbed over the parapet and dropped over on the other side till the tips of their toes found a foothold in the decrepit wall, and so got down to the field below in a few minutes. If they came in from the country, their eyes, stretched wide open, seemed to be staring into mine, as I peeped timidly over the edge of the parapet; but of course I was wrong to think so, since all they were interested in was finding the best foothold. In any case, while they were hanging over the abyss like that-usually in pairs, one behind the other-I would hear them chatting peacefully away in dialect, just as if they were walking along a path through the fields. How calm and strong and brave they were !-I said to myself. After they had climbed right up, till they were quite near my face, so near that often, apart from being mirrored in their eyes, I was submerged in their stinking wine-laden breath, they grabbed the inner rim of the parapet with their thick calloused fingers, and, emerging straight out of space-oops !-there they were, safe and sound. I should never manage such a thing-I said to myself each time, as I watched them move away: filled with admiration, but with a powerful dose of the creeps as well.

Well, I felt something similar now, as I faced the garden wall from the top of which Micol Finzi-Contini had invited me to climb. It certainly wasn’t as high as the bastions at the Montagnone. But it was smoother, much less corroded by time and weather; and the notches Micol had pointed out to me barely showed. And suppose-I thought-my head started spinning as I climbed and I came crashing down? I might be killed just the same.

And yet this wasn’t really the reason why I still hesitated. What kept me back was a revulsion that differed from the purely physical one of dizziness: it was analogous, but different, and stronger. For a moment I managed to regret my recent despair, my silly childish tears at failing an old exam.

“And I can’t quite see,” I said, “why I should start mountaineering right here. If you’re inviting me in, thanks very much, I’ll accept with pleasure ; but quite honestly, it seems very much more comfortable to go in through there” -and I raised my arm in the direction of corso Ercole 1-“through the gate. How long will it take? With my bike I’ll be there in a min ute. ’ ’

I realized at once that my suggestion had not gone down too well.

“Oh no, no ...” said Micol, twisting her face into an expression of intense annoyance. “If you go through there Perotti’s bound to see you, and then it’s good-bye to all the fun.”

“Perotti? Who’s he?”

“The porter. You know, you may have noticed him, heacts as our coachman and chauffeur as well. . . . Ifhe sees you-and he can’t help seeing you, because apart from the times he goes out with the carriage or the car, he’s always there on guard, the old pig-I’ll just have to take you to the house, afterwards. . . . And just tell me if . . . what d’you think?”

She looked straight into my eyes: serious, now, although very calm.

“Right,” I said, turning my head, and jerking my chin at the bank, “but where shall I leave my bike? I can’t possibly just leave it here abandoned! It’s new, a Wolsit: with an electric lamp, a tool-bag, a pump, just think ... if I let my bike be taken
as well. . .
.”

I said no more, suffering again at the thought of the inevitable meeting with my father. That very evening, as late as possible, I’d have to go home. I had no choice.

I turned to look at Micol again. Without a word, she had sat up on the wall as I was talking, with her back to me; and now she lifted a leg decisively and sat astride it.

“What are you up to?” I said, surprised.

“I’ve got an idea, about the bike. And at the same time I can show you the best places to put your feet. Watch where I put mine. Look.”

She vaulted nimbly over the wall, up there on top of it, and then, grabbing the big rusty nail she had shown me before with her right hand, she started coming down. She came slowly but surely, looking for footholds with the toes of her tennis shoes, first one and then the other, and always finding them without too much trouble. She came down beautifully. But before touching the ground, she missed a foothold and slithered. Luckily she fell on her feet; but she had hurt her fingers; besides which, as it scraped against the wall, her pink linen dress, a kind of beach affair, had torn a bit at one of the armpits.

“How stupid,” she grumbled, blowing on her hand. “It’s the first time that’s happened to me.”

She had grazed her knee as well. She raised a piece ofher dress and showed an oddly white, strong thigh, already a woman’s, and leant over to examine the graze. Two long blonde locks, among the lightest of her hair, which had slipped out of the band that kept it in place, fell forward and hid her forehead and her eyes.

“How stupid,” she repeated.

“Needs surgical spirit,” I said mechanically, without going near her, in the rather gloomy tone everyone in my family used in similar circumstances.

“Surgical spirit my foot.”

She licked the wound, fast: a kind of httle affectionate kiss; and stood up again at once.

“Come on,” she said, all red and disheveUed.

She turned and started climbing obliquely along the sunny edge of the bank. With her right hand she pulled herself along, hanging on to tufts of grass; while with her left she kept taking the circular hairband on and off, as fast as if she were combing her hair.

“See that hole over there?” she said to me, as soon as we got to the top. “You can easily hide the bike in there.”

She pointed about fifty yards ahead, to one of those grassy conical mounds, not more than two yards high, and with the opening nearly always covered with earth, found fairly often along the walls at Ferrara. They looked a bit like the Etruscan
montarozzi
of the Roman campagna; on a much smaller scale, of course. But the often huge room below ground, which any

one of them may open into, has never been used to house the dead. The old defenders of the wall once kept their arms there: cannon, arquebuses, powder, and so on-and maybe those strange cannon-balls of rare marble that in the fifteenth and sixteenth century made the Ferrarese artillery so much feared in Europe. You can still see at the castle, decorating the main courtyard and the terraces.

“Who on earth would guess there was a new Wolsit under there? You’d have to know. Ever been inside?”

I shook my head.

“No? I have, hundreds of times. It’s
gorgeous.”

She moved decisively, and I picked the Wolsit up from the ground, and followed her in silence.

I joined her at the opening. It was a sort of vertical crack, cut straight out of the neat grass cover of the mound: and so narrow that only one person could go in at a time. Immediately inside the floor sloped down; and you could see it for eight or ten yards, not more. Beyond that was shadowy. As if the tunnel ended against a black curtain.

Micol leant forward to look, and then suddenly turned.

“You go down,” she whispered, and smiled faintly, embarrassed. “I’d rather wait for you up here.”

She stood on one side, her hands clasped behind her back, leaning against the grassy wall by the opening.

“You don’t mind it, do you?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

“Oh, no,” I lied, and leant down to lift the bike up on my back.

Without another word, I went past her into the mound.

I had to go slowly, because of the bicycle, apart from everything else, and its right pedal kept banging into the walls; and at first, for three or four yards at least, I was quite blind, couldn't see a thing. About ten yards from the opening, though (“Look out!” Micol’s already distant voice shouted behind me at this point: “Mind the steps !”), I began to make things out a bit. The tunnel ended a little farther ahead: the floor sloped down for a few yards, not more. And it was from there, in fact, starting from a kind of landing round which, before I got there, I could make out something completely different-the steps Micol had told me about.

When I reached the landing, I paused a moment.

The childish fear of the dark and the unknown that I had felt when I moved away from Micol was gradually replaced, as I went below, by a no less childish feeling of relief: as if, having got away from Micol’s company in time, I had escaped a greater danger, the greatest danger a boy of my age (“A boy of your age”: it was one of my father’s favourite expressions) could meet. Oh, yes-I thought now-when I went home that evening my father might smack me. But I could now face his whacks quite calmly. An exam to take again in October: Micol was right to laugh at me. What was an exam in October compared with what-and I trembled-might have happened to us down there in the darkness? Maybe I’d have dared to kiss Micol: kiss her on the lips. And then? What would have happened afterwards? In the films I’d seen, and in novels, kissesjust went on and on, long and passionate! But in actual fact, in comparison with
the rest,
it was only a moment, a moment that was really quite unimportant, since, once lips had come together, and mouths pretty well interpenetrated each other, the thread of the narrative couldn’t as a rule be taken up until the following morning, or even until several days later. All right, all right: but suppose Micol and I had got to the point of kissing like that-and the darkness would obviously have made it easier-time would have run quietly on after the kiss, with no providential intervention from outside to help us land up suddenly on the morning after. However should I have filled the minutes, the hours? Oh, but it hadn’t happened, luckily. Just as well I’d saved myself.