The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (7 page)

I started going down the steps. A little light filtered feebly in: I noticed it now. And partly through sight, and partly through hearing (it didn’t take much: a bump against the wall with the bike, a heel slithering down one of the steps, and the echo enlarged and multiplied the sound right away, giving an idea of spaces and distances), I soon realized how enormous the place was. It must have been a room about forty yards across, I calculated, round, and with a dome-shaped roof at least as high. A kind of overturned funnel. And who knows: maybe through a system of secret passages it was linked with other underground rooms of the same kind-there must have been dozens of them inside the bastions. Nothing easier.

The floor was an earth one, smooth, damp and compact. I tripped over a brick, and then, groping my way along the curve of the wall, trod on straw. I leant the bike against the wall and sat down, one hand grasping its wheel and the other arm round my knee. Only the odd squeak and rustle broke the silence: rats, very likely, or bats. . . .

And suppose it had happened? I thought. Would it really have been so frightful, if it had?

It was pretty well certain I’d not have gone home again, and my parents, and Otello Forti, and Sergio Pavani, and all the others, including the police, would have had a high old time searching for me! At first they’d have dashed around, looking everywhere. Even the newspapers would have talked about it, and fished out all their usual notions: kidnapping, accident, suicide, a secret dash abroad. Then little by little things would have subsided. My parents would have calmed down (after all, they’d still have Ernesto and Fanny left), and the search would have been called off. And the person who’d have paid for it most in the end would be that stupid old crawthumper Fabiani, who’d be packed off “to another seat of learning”, as Mel-dolesi would put it, for a punishment. Where? Oh, to Sicily or Sardinia, of course. And serve her jolly well right! That way she’d learn, to her cost, not to be such a sneaky old bitch.

As for me, as the others took it quietly, I’d take it quietly myself Outside, I could count on Micol: she’d see to bringing me food and anything else I needed. She’d come to me every day, climbing the garden wall, summer and winter. And every day we’d kiss, in the dark: because I was her man, and she was my woman.

And anyway, there was no law against my ever going outside again ! In the daytime I’d sleep, of course, breaking my slumbers only when I felt my lips brushed by Micol’s, and then afterwards sleeping again, with her in my arms. But at night, why at night I could perfectly well make long sorties outside, specially if I chose the early hours of the morning, around one or two o’clock when everyone was asleep, and practically no one was left in the streets. How strange and terrible, but what fun as well, to go along via Scandiana, and see our house again, see the windows of my bedroom, now used as a sitting-room; hidden in the shadows some way away, peer at my father coming home from the club at that very moment, without the faintest glimmer of an idea that I was alive, and watching him. He’d take the keys out ofhis pocket, open the door, go inside, and then, quite calmly, just as if I, his eldest son, had never existed, slam the door shut.

And what about my mother? Couldn’t I try, some day or other, to let her know, through Micol maybe, that I wasn't dead? And see her again, before I got sick of my underground existence and left Ferrara for good? Why not? Of course I could!

How long I stayed there I don’t know. Ten minutes, maybe ; maybe less. In any case I remember quite definitely that as I went up the steps, and back into the tunnel again (without the weight of the bike I was now going fast), I kept on thinking, imagining. And what about my mother?-I wondered. Would she, like everyone else, forget me?

In the end I found myself out in the open; and Micol was no longer there, waiting for me where I’d left her a bit before, but, as I saw almost at once, shielding my eyes against the sunlight, she was up again astride the garden wall of Barchetto del Duca.

She was arguing away with someone who was waiting at the bottom of the ladder, on the other side of the wall: the coachman Perotti, very likely, or even professor Ermanno himself. It was obvious: they’d noticed the ladder leaning against the wall and had realized at once how she’d been slipping off. Now they were asking her to come down. And she wouldn’t make up her mind to obey.

At last she turned and saw me on top of the bank and blew out her cheeks as if to say:

“Phew! At last!”

And her final look, before she disappeared on the other side of the wall (a look that went with a smiling wink: just like those she’d given me in the synagogue, when she peeped at me under my father’s tal'ed), was for me.

The time I managed to get properly inside, beyond the garden wall of Barchetto del Duca, and to push on among the trees and clearings of the great private wood until I reached the
magna domus
and the tennis court, was quite a lot later, almost ten years.

It was in 1938, about two months after the racial laws had been introduced. I remember it very well: one afternoon towards the end of October, a few minutes after we had got up from the table, I had a telephone call from Alberto Finzi-Contini. Was it true or wasn’t it, he asked me at once, without any preamble (and the fact was we had had no chance of exchanging a word for over five years), was it true or wasn’t it that I and “all the others” had had letters signed by mar-chese Barbicinti, vice-president and secretary of the 
Eleonora d’Este
tennis club, expelling the lot of us from the club: in fact, “chucking us out”?

I denied it sharply: it wasn’t true, there’d been no such letter; not to me, anyway.

But straight away, as if he thought my denial completely valueless, or actually hadn’t been listening, he suggested I should come along to their house right away and play. If I didn’t mind a plain earth court-he said-without much surround; if, above all, as I was sure to be a much better player than they were, I'd “deign to knock a ball about a bit” with him and Micol both of them would be delighted and “honoured”. And any afternoon would do for them, if I liked the idea, he went on. Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow: I could come whenever I pleased and bring along anyone I pleased, on Saturdays as well, of course. Apart from the fact that he’d be staying in Ferrara at least another month, as his term at the Polytechnic in Milan wouldn't be starting before November 2oth (Micol took it all much more calmly than he did, as a rule: and this year, what with the excuse that she was 
Juori corso
,
¹
and had no need to turn up and get things signed, heaven knows if she’d ever set foot in the university), wasn't this simply marvellous weather? As long as it lasted, it would be a crime not to take advantage of it.

These last words were spoken with less conviction: it seemed as if some unhappy thought had come to him all at once, or else that, quite suddenly and without reason, he was bored by the thought of my coming, and hoped I’d take no notice of his invitation.

I thanked him, without promising anything definite. Why had he telephoned? I wondered, with astonishment, as I put back the receiver. Since he and his sister had been sent to study outside Ferrara (Alberto in ’33, Micol in ’34: about the time professor Ermanno had had permission from the Jewish community to do up “for the use of his family and of those who might possibly be interested”, the ex-Spanish synagogue incorporated in the buildings of the synagogue via Mazzini, since when the seat behind ours, in the Italian synagogue, had remained strictly empty) we had seen each other only very rarely, and always fleetingly and from a distance. We had become such strangers, during that time, that one morning in 1935, on the station at Bologna (I was in my second year at the university, reading Italian, and went there and back every day by train), when a tall dark pale youth with a plaid rug over his arm and a porter loaded with suitcases at his heels hurtled violently into me on platform one as he dashed for the just-leaving Milan express, I didn’t even faintly recognize Alberto Finzi-Contini right away. When we reached the end of the train he turned to hurry the porter, at the same time giving me an absent-minded glance as I turned to protest and vanishing into the carriage. That time-I kept thinking-he hadn’t even felt the need to greet me. And so why such smarmy friendliness now?

“Who was it?” asked my father, the minute I got back into the dining-room.

There was no one else in the room. He was sitting in the armchair beside the wireless, waiting anxiously, as usual, for the two o’clock news.

“Alberto Finzi-Contini.”

“Who? The boy? Well, how condescending ! And what does he want?”

He gazed at me with his blue, bewildered eyes, which had long ago lost hope of influencing me, or of guessing what was going through my head. He knew perfectly well-he told me with his eyes-that his questions annoyed me, that his everlasting efforts to poke his nose into my life were indiscreet and unreasonable. But, good God, wasn't he my father? And couldn't I see how he'd aged, this last year? My mother and Fanny he couldn’t trust: they were women. Nor Ernesto either: he was too small. So who was he to talk to? Could I possibly not realize that I was just the one he needed ?

I clenched my teeth and told him what it was all about.

“Well, are you going?”

He gave me no time to answer. Right away, warming up the way he did every time he got a chance of dragging me into any kind of conversation-and if it was on politics all the better-he plunged headlong into “getting things straight”.

Unfortunately it was true-he began burbling, tirelessly: on September 22nd, after the first official announcement on the 9th, all the newspapers had published that additional circular from the party secretary about various “practical measures” the provincial Federations should take right away with regard to us. In future, “mixed marriages were to be strictly forbidden, all young people known to belong to the Jewish race were to be excluded from the state schools of every kind and level”, and denied the “high honour” of compulsory military service; and we Jews could no longer announce deaths in the newspaper, have our names in the telephone directory, have Aryan servants, or belong to “leisure-time clubs” of any kind. And yet, in spite of that . . . .

“I hope you’re not going to trot out the usual stuff,” I broke in at this point, shaking my head.

“What stuff?”

“About Mussolini being more
good
than Hitler.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “But you’ve got to admit it. Hitler's a bloody lunatic, whereas Mussolini may be a turncoat and as Machiavellian as you like, but . . .”

I broke in again, unable to restrain an impatient gesture. Did he or didn't he agree-I asked, rather abruptly -with the thesis of Leon Trotsky’s essay, which I’d handed him a few days ago?

I was referring to an article published in an old number of the
Nouvelle
Revue
Francaise,
several complete years of which I kept jealously in my room. This was how it happened: for some reason, I can’t remember what, I had been rude to my father. He was hurt, and sulked, and, as I wanted to re-establish normal relations as soon as possible, I thought the best thing to do was tell him what I had been reading just lately. Flattered by this sign of my good opinion, my father didn’t wait to be asked twice. At once he read, or rather devoured, the article, underlining away in pencil, smothering the margins of the pages with closely written notes. In fact -he had told me explicitly - what “that old scoundrel, Lenin’s chum” had written had been a real revelation to him as well.

“But of course I agree!” he exclaimed, pleased to find me ready to discuss things, and disconcerted at the same time. “There’s no doubt about it, Trotsky’s marvellous at polemics. And what fire, what language ! He’s quite capable ofhaving written the article in French himself. Yes, the fact is,” and he smiled proudly, “those Russian and Polish Jews mayn't be terribly likeable, but they’ve always had a perfect genius for languages. They’ve got it in their blood.”