The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (8 page)

“Stop worrying about languages, we’re talking about concepts,” I broke in, with a touch of school-masterish sharpness I regretted at once.

The article was quite clear, I went on more gently. Capitalism, in its phase of imperialistic expansion, couldn’t help being intolerant of all national minorities, and of the Jews, who are
the
minority, by definition. Now, in the light of this general theory (Trotsky’s essay was written in 1931, we mustn’t forget: the year in which Hitler’s real rise to power began), what did it matter that Mussolini, as a person, was better than Hitler? And was he, in fact, any better, even as a person?

“I see, I see . . .” my father kept repeating softly, while I spoke.

His eyelids drooped, his face was twisted, as ifhe had something painful to endure. At last, when he was quite certain I had nothing more to add, he laid a hand on my knee.

He had understood-he told me yet again, slowly opening his eyes. But just let him speak: he thought things looked too black to me, too catastrophic.

Why wouldn’t I admit, in fact, that after the announcement on September 9th, and even after the additional circular of the 22nd, things, at least at Ferrara, had in fact carried on pretty weil the way they’d done before? It was perfectly true-he admitted, with a melancholy smile-during the last month, out of the 750 members of our community no one important enough to deserve space in the
Corriere ferrarese 
had died (just a couple of old women in the home in via Vittoria, ifhe wasn’t mistaken: one called Saralvo, and the other Rietti; and old girl Rietti wasn’t even from hereabouts, but from some Mantuan village: Sabbioneta, Viadana, Pomponesco, or something like that). But let’s be fair: the telephone directories hadn’t been withdrawn to be reprinted, purged; not a single 
haverta,
* maid, cook, nurse, or old housekeeper, serving in any of our families, had suddenly discovered a “racial conscience” and packed her bags; the
Circolo dei Commercianti,
where the lawyer Lattes had been vice-president for over ten years-and which, as I must know, he still frequented, undisturbed, almost daily-hadn’t so far asked anyone to resign. And had Bruno Lattes, Leone Lattes’s boy, been expelled from the tennis club, by any chance? Without a thought for my brother Ernesto, who was always gaping at me, openmouthed, poor boy, and imitating me as if I was heaven knows what
haham,t
I’d stopped going to the tennis club: and I was wrong, I must really let him say it, quite wrong to shut myself away, and segregate myself, and refuse to see anyone, and then, with the excuse of the university and my season ticket, slink off to Bologna three or four times a week. (I no longer wanted to see even Nino Bottecchiari, Sergio Pavani, and Otello Forti, my inseparable friends until a year ago, here in Ferrara; and you couldn’t say they’d let a month go by without ringing me up, sometimes one and sometimes another of them, poor chaps!) Whereas look at young Lattes, now. As far as one gathered from the sports pages of the
Corriere Jerrarese,
he wasn’t just taking part regularly in the last tournament of the season, which was now in full swing, but getting on splendidly in the mixed doubles, where he was partnered by that pretty Adriana Trentini, whose father was chief engineer of the province: they’d won three matches easily, and were now getting ready for the semi-finals. Oh, no, you could say what you liked about old Barbicinti: that he was rather too keen on his own (pretty modest) family arms, for instance, and not quite keen enough on the grammar of the articles promoting tennis which the party’s Federal Secretary got him to write every now and then for the 
Corriere Jerrarese.
 But that he was a man of integrity and honour, for all that, not the least bit hostile to the Jews, and pretty mildly fascist-and as he said “fascist” my father’s voice quivered, very slightly and timidly quivered-no one could doubt or dispute.

* “Maidservant” in Hebrew.

t Hebrew term meaning “sage” or “scholar”.

Now, about Alberto’s invitation, and the behaviour of the Finzi-Continis in general: why, like a bolt from the blue, this sudden excitement of theirs, this sudden passionate need to get in touch?

What had happened last week at the synagogue, at Roshashana, was odd enough already (as usual, I’d refused to come: and once again, ifl’d forgive him saying so, I’d been wrong). Yes, it had been pretty odd already, bang at the height of the service, and with the pews full to bursting, to see Ermanno Finzi-Contini all of a sudden, and his wife and mother-in-law, followed by the two children and the inevitable Herrera uncles from Venice-the whole tribe, in fact, male and female all bundled in together-solemnly re-entering the Italian synagogue after a good five years of disdainful isolation in the Spanish synagogue: and looking so smug and so benign, too, for all the world as if they meant their presence to reward and
forgive
not just everyone present but the entire Jewish community. But, quite obviously, this hadn’t been enough. They’d now got to the pitch of actually inviting people to their house: to Barchetto del Duca, just think of that now, where since Josette Artom’s day no outsider had set foot, except strictly in emergencies. And would I like to hear just why? Well, obviously, because they were pleased with what was happening,
hahi*
as they'd always been (all right, all right, they’d been against fascism, but
halti
most of all),
deep down they actually liked the racial laiwsl
If they’d only been good Zionists, now. At least, seeing that here, in Italy and in Ferrara, they had always felt so much out of things, so much on loan as it were, they could have taken advantage of the situation to transfer themselves to Israel once and for all. But no. Apart from digging out a bit of money for Israel just occasionally-and there was nothing very odd about that, in any case-they’d never done a thing. When they really forked out, it was always for some aristocratic nonsense: like the time in ’33, when, to find an
ehal
and a
parochct
worthy of appearing in their own personal synagogue (authentic sephardic vestments, for goodness sake, and not Portuguese or Catalan or Provens:al, but Spanish-and the right size!) they pushed off by car, followed by a big lorry, no less, as far as Cherasco, in the province of Cuneo, a village where a now extinctJewish community had lived until 1910, or thereabouts, and where only the cemetery still functioned because a few families from Turin, who’d sprung from the place, Debenedettis, Momilianos, Terracinis, still kept on burying their dead there. And Josette Artom, now, Alberto and Micol’s grandmother, in her day had kept bringing in palms and eucalyptus trees from the botanical garden in Rome, the one at the foot of the Gianicolo: and so-just so that the carts could get through easily, but for plain swank as well, quite obviously-she'd made her husband, poor Menotti, widen the way in through the garden wall of Barchetto del Duca, so that the gate was at least twice as big as any other in Corso Ercole I d’Este. Well, what happens is that if you’re crazy about collecting-things, plants, everything-you end up wanting to collect people as well. And if the Finis-Continis sighed for the ghetto (clearly that’s where they’d like to see everyone shut in: and quite prepared, in view of this fine ideal, to carve Barchetto del Duca into a kind of 
kibbuz, 
under their own exalted patronage) : well, they were perfectly free to do so, let them go ahead. But just in case they did, he’d always preferred Palestine. Or, even better, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, or Madagascar. . . .

 * Plural of
lialto,
“bigots”.

It was Tuesday. I could not say why a few days later, on the Saturday of that same week, I made up my mind to do exactly the opposite of what my father wanted. It was not, I think, the usual quite mechanical opposition that makes children disobey their parents: perhaps all that made me suddenly take out my racket and tennis clothes, which had been lying in a drawer for over a year, was the bright day, and the delicate caressing air ofan unusually sunny afternoon in early autumn.

In any case, several things had happened in the meantime.

First of all, two days after Alberto’s telephone call I think it was, which makes it the Thursday, the letter “accepting” my resignation from the
Eleonora dEste 
tennis club in fact arrived. Typewritten, but long-windedly signed at the bottom by N.H.* marchese Ippolito Barbicinti, the registered letter, sent express, indulged in nothing personal or particular. Its few dry lines, clumsily echoing the bureaucratic style, went straight to the point: simply mentioned the Federal Secretary’s “definite orders”, and went on to say that the future presence of my “distinguished self” was “in-admisible” (sic) at the tennis club. (Could marchese * Abbreviation of
Nobil Huomo,
a title of nobility.

Barbicinti ever refrain from seasoning his prose with spelling mistakes? Obviously not. But noticing them and laughing at them was a bit harder this time than it had been.)

Secondly, the following day I think, Friday, I had another telephone call from the
magna doinus
; and not from Alberto, this time, but from MicOl.

It resulted in a long, in fact enormously long conversation: the tone of which Micol especially kept up as that of an ordinary, ironical, rambling chat between two seasoned university students between whom, as children, there might have beenjust a pinch of tenderness, but who now, after something like ten years, want nothing but a sober homecoming.

“How long since we met?”

“Five years or more.”

“And what are you like, these days?”

“Ugly. A red-nosed old maid. And what about you? Which reminds me: d’you know that I read . . .”

“Read what?”

“In the papers. That you were in that Art and Culture racket at Venice a couple of years ago. Flying the flag, weren’t you? Pretty good ! But of course you were always frightfully good at Italian, right from the start. Meldolesi was just
mad
about some of the essays you wrote at school. I think he even brought some along to read to us.”

“That’s nothing to laugh at. And what about you, what are you doing?”

“Nothing. I ought to have taken my degree in English at Venice lastJune. But what the hell. Laziness permitting, let’s hope I do this year. D’you think they’ll let those who are
Juori corso*
fmishjust the same?”

* See note on page 66.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m perfectly sure they will. Have you picked your thesis yet?”

“Well, yes, I have: on Emily Dickinson, you know, that nineteenth-century American poet, a rather ghastly old girl. . . . But what am I to do? I’d have to trail round after the prof, and spend whole fortnights at Venice, and after a bit the Pearl of the Laguna makes me . ... In all these years I’ve been there as little as possible. And besides, to be quite honest, I’ve never been terribly good at that sort of thing.”

“Liar. Liar and snob.”

“No, honestly, I
swear.
And to go and sit there like a good little girl this autumn-well, I feel less like it than ever. I say, d’you know what I’d really like to do, instead of burying myself in the library?”

“Let’s hear.”

“Play tennis, dance and flirt, just imagine!”

“Well, that sounds harmless enough, dancing and tennis included, but you could perfectly well do it all in Venice, if you liked.”

“Oh, I bet . . . with my uncles’ housekeeper always at my heels!”

“Well, tennis at any rate you can perfectly well manage. Now me, for instance, the minute I can I dash off by train to Bologna to . . . ”

“Oh, come off it, you’re off to see your girl friend. Confess, now.’’

“No, no. I’ve got to take my degree next year as well. I still don’t know whether it’ll be in the history of art or in Italian, but I think it’ll be Italian, now. And when I feel like it, I just allow myself an hour’s tennis. I hire a court, in via del Cestello or at the Littoriale (they’re hard courts, as you can imagine: with warm showers, a bar, all mod. cons. . . .) and nobody can object. Why don’t you do the same, in Venice?” “The trouble is that for playing tennis or dancing you need a
partner,*
and in Venice I just don’t know a soul that’s right. And then I must say, Venice is all very beautiful, I’m not arguing that, but I just don’t fit in there. I feel on the hop, an outsider ... a bit like being abroad.”

“D’you sleep at your uncles’ house?”

“Yes, of course: sleep and eat.”

“I see. Well, I’m grateful to you for not coming to the university for that business two years ago. Honestly. I feel it’s the blackest page in my life.”

“Why? After all. . . . D’you know that at one point as I knew you’d be there I actually had the idea ofgoing along to cheer . . . you know, just to raise the flag. . . . But listen: d’you remember that time on the Wall of the Angels out here, the year you failed in maths? Poor old thing, you must have been crying your eyes out: they looked like nothing on earth ! I wanted to cheer you up. I even had the idea of making you climb over the wall into the garden. Well, why didn’t you? I know tftat you didn’t come in, but I can’t remember why.”

“Because someone surprised us, bang in the middle.” “Ah, yes, Perotti, that old hound the gardener.” “Gardener? Coachman, I thought he was.” “Gardener, coachman, chauffeur, porter, everything.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Goodness, yes ! ”

“And the dog, the real dog, the one that barked?” “Who? Yor?”

“Yes, the Great Dane.”

* In English in the original.

“Oh, he’s alive and kicking as well.”

She repeated her brother’s invitation (“I don’t know if Albert’s rung you up, but why don’t you come here for a game with us?”); but without pressing it, and, unlike him, without referring to marchese Barbicinti’s letter. She mentioned nothing, in fact, but the simple pleasure of seeing each other after so long, and of enjoying together, in spite of everything against it, whatever was enjoyable in the season.