The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (9 page)

I was not the only one invited.

When, that Saturday afternoon, having avoided corso Giovecca and the middle of town, I came out at the end of corso Ercole I from piazza della Certosa, I immediately noticed a small group of tennis players in the shade outside the Finzi-Continis’ gate. There were four boys and a girl, all with bikes like me; and they all, as I realized at once, were regular players at the 
Eleonora d’Este
tennis club. Unlike me, they were all dressed for the game, in gaudy pullovers and shorts: only one, who was older than the others, about twenty-five, and was smoking a pipe, and whom I didn’t know even by sight, was wearing white linen trousers and a brown corduroy jacket. Eager to be admitted, they must have already pressed the bell at the gate several times, but with no result, that was obvious: and in light-hearted protest, and quite oblivious of the very occasional passers-by, they stopped talking and laughing, now and then, and all together, rhythmically, rang their bicycle bells.

I braked, tempted to turn back. But it was now too late. Two or three of them had already seen me, had stopped ringing their bells and were looking at me curiously. One of them, whom as I approached I suddenly recognized as Bruno Lattes, was actually signalling to me, brandishing his racket at the end of a long skinny arm. He wanted me to recognize him (we had never been friends : he was two years younger than me, so even at Bologna University we’d never met very often), and at the same time was trying to urge me on. I stopped right in front of him.

“Hello,” I said. “What’s this get-together about? Is the big tournament over? Or are these aU the vanquished?”

I had talked to them all and to no one in particular, and I think I was grinning, my left arm on the smooth oak of the gate, my feet still on the pedals. As I did so, I looked them over: Adriana Trentini, fine coppery hair loose on her shoulders, long and admittedly marvellous legs, but an over-white skin curiously splotched with red, as always happened when she was hot; the silent youth with the pipe, linen trousers and brown jacket (who was he? definitely not from Ferrara !-I said to myself at once); the other two boys, very much younger than him and even than Adriana: maybe still at school or at the technical institute, and for that very reason, since they had “come on” in the past year, during which I had gradually drawn away from every circle in town, hardly known to me at all ; and lastly Bruno, there ni front of me, taller and drier than ever, and, with his dark skin, more than ever like a young, vibrant, worried Negro: in such a state of nervous excitement, even that day, that he managed to transmit it to me through the light contact between the front tyres of our bikes.

The inevitable flicker ofJewish understanding passed between us, quickly; as, halfanxious and halfrevolted, I had already foreseen it would. Then I went on, looking meaningly at him :

“I hope you asked
signor
Barbicinti’s permission before coming to play somewhere else.”

The unknown outsider, obviously surprised by my sarcastic tone, or perhaps uneasy, made a small movement beside me. Instead of soothing me, this excited me even more.

“Now come on and tell me,” I insisted. “Are you allowed to do this, or have you just slunk off?” “What are you talking about!” Adriana burst out, with her usual thoughtlessness: it was quite innocent, of course, but no less offensive for that. “Don’t you know what happened last Wednesday, during the finals of the mixed doubles? Don’t tell me you weren’t there: and do drop this eternal Vittorio Alfi.eri pose of yours. I saw you in the audience, while we were playing, with my own two eyes.”

“Well, I wasn’t there,” I retorted drily. “It’s at least a year since I’ve set foot in the place.”

“And why?”

“Because I was sure I’d be chucked out sooner or later whatever I did. And I wasn’t mistaken, as it turns out: here’s the letter expelling me.”

I took the envelope out of my jacket pocket.

“I expect you’ve had one too,” I said, turning to Bruno.

It was only at this point that Adriana seemed to remember that I was in the same condition as her partner in the mixed doubles. She was dearly upset; but the thought ofhaving something important to tell me, which I obviously knew nothing about, quickly made her forget it.

Something very “unpleasant” had happened, she told me, while one of the two youngest boys again pressed the small sharp bell-push of black horn. Maybe I didn’t know, but in the tournament that was just over at the tennis club, she and Bruno had got right into the finals, no less-which was something neither of them had ever even dreamt of. Well then: the final match was in full swing, and once again things had begun taking the most incredible turn (enough to make everyone goggle, quite honestly: Desiree Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo, two real stars at the game, in trouble with a couple of non-classed players: even to the point oflosing the first set ten-eight, and being outmatched in the second as well!), when suddenly mar-chese Barbicinti, who was judge and umpire of the tournament, on his own initiative interrupted the match. It was six o’clock, admittedly, and they couldn’t see too well. But not so dark that they couldn’t have carried on for at least another two games! Heavens, what a way to behave! At four-two in the second set of an important match, no one had the right to shout “stop” out of the blue, to march on to the court waving his arms and declaring the match suspended “because of the darkness”, and putting the whole thing off till the following afternoon. Besides, the marchese wasn’t acting in good faith at all, that was perfectly obvious. And if she, Adriana, hadn’t noticed him, at the end of the first set, in an excited huddle with that creep Gino Cariani, secretary of the G.U.F.* (they’d moved a bit away from the crowd, next to the little building where the changing rooms were); and Cariani, perhaps so as not to be noticed, had his back turned to the tennis court as if to say: “Carry on, carry on with your game, it’s not you we’re talking about”: all she’d have needed was the marchese’s face as he bent down to open the gate into the courts, so pale and bewildered she’d never seen anything like it-a real proper death’s-head! -to guess that the gathering darkness was only a pretext, a feeble excuse. Anyway, how could you possibly doubt it? The interrupted match was never even mentioned, as next morning Bruno got exactly the same express letter as I’d had, the one I’d wanted to show her. And she, Adriana, had been so disgusted by the whole business-so outraged, apart from everything else, at anyone having the bad taste to mix sport and politics-that she’d sworn never to set foot in the
Eleonora dEste
club again. Suppose they’d got something against Bruno, well, they could have forbidden him to take part in the tournament; said frankly: “Things being the way they are, we’re terribly sorry, but we can’t accept you for it.” But once the tournament had started, in fact was nearly over and he was within a hair’s breadth of winning one of the matches, theyjust shouldn’t have behaved the way they did. Four-two! What pigs! The sort of piggery you might expect from Zulus, not from anyone supposed to be educated and civilized !

Adriana Trentini spoke excitedly, getting more and more worked up, and Bruno butted in occasionally, adding details.

• Gruppo universitario fascista-Fascist university youth movement.

According to him, it was Cariani’s fault the match was broken up, and if you knew him at all it was just exactly what you might expect. It was all too obvious: an “undersized little runt” like that, with his tubercular chest and the frame of a shrimp, whose one thought, from the minute he got into the G.U.F., was to get ahead, and who never missed a chance, in public or in private, to lick the Federal Secretary’s boots (hadn’t I ever seen him at the Caffc della Borsa, on the rare occasions when he managed to sit down at the same table as the “old ruffians of the
Bombamano”
?* He fairly puffed himself up, cursed and swore outrageously, but the minute consul Bolognesi, or old Calamity, or some other bigwig in the group contradicted him, he’d have his tail between his legs in no time, doing the most menialjobs, like running to the tobacconist’s in the theatre arcade to buy the Federal Secretary a packet of fags, or ringing up old Calamity’s home to tell his exwasherwoman wife when the great man would be home, and such, to curry favour and get himself forgiven) : a worm like that obviously wouldn’t lose the chance, you could bet your life on that, of cutting a dash in the party once again! Marchese Barbicinti was what he was: a distinguished old chap, no doubt about that, but rather hard up, submissive, and anything but a hero. If they kept him on to run the tennis club, it was because he looked good in the part, and above all because ofhis name, which they may have thought had some quite remarkable snob-value. Now it must have been ridiculously easy for Cariani to give the poor old nobleman the shakes. He may even have said to him: “And what about tomorrow? Have you thought of tomorrow evening, marchese, when the Federal Secretary will be coming here for the ball, and he’ll find he’s gor to give the silver cup and the Roman salute and the rest ofit to a ... Lattes? I’d say it’ll mean a scandal, and a great fat one at that. And trouble; endless trouble. If I was in your shoes, seeing it’s getting dark, I wouldn’t think twice about stopping the match.” It wouldn’t need any more than that, as sure as eggs is eggs, to make the marchese break things up the way he had, so grotesquely and so disagreeably.

* “Hand grenade squad.” The name of the shock troops to which the “old ruffians” had belonged.

Before Adriana and Bruno had finished bringing me up to date on what had happened (at one point Adriana even managed to introduce me to the stranger: who was called Malnate, Giampiero Malnate, and came from Milan, a newly-qualified chemist working in one of the new synthetic rubber factories in the industrial zone), the gate was finally opened; and a fat, thick-set man of about sixty appeared, with short grey hair which the early afternoon sun, streaming in through the gate’s narrow vertical opening, lit with metallic gleams, and a short grey moustache under a fleshy, purplish nose: a bit like Hitler, it struck me, the nose and moustache. Yes, it was old Perotti himself, gardener, coachman, chauffeur, porter, everything, as Micol had told me, and on the whole not the least bit changed since our schooldays, when he’d sat up on his box, waiting impassively for the dark and ominous den that had swallowed up his two fearless, smiling young charges to give them back at last, no less serene and sure of themselves, to the coach, all glass, varnish, nickelplating, padded cloth and valuable wood-really just like a precious casket-the upkeep and driving of which was his sole responsibility. The small eyes, for instance, which were grey as well and sharp, glittering with hard, peasant Venetian shrewdness, laughed good-naturedly under the thick, nearly black eyelashes: exactly as they had done before. But what were they laughing at now? The fact that we’d been left hanging about for at least ten minutes? Or was he laughing at himself, for turning up in a striped jacket and white cotton gloves: brand new, the gloves were, and probably put on for the occasion.

So we went in, and, once inside the gate that the officious Perotti clanged straight away behind us, we were greeted by the hefty barking of Yor, the black and white “harlequin”. He came trotting down the drive towards us, looking tired and not the slightest bit alarming. But Bruno and Adriana shut up at once.

“He won’t bite, will he?” Adriana asked, scared.

“Don’t you worry, signorina,” said Perotti. “Whatever could he bite these days, with the three or four teeth he’s got left? Polenta, that’s about all. . . .”

And while the decrepit Yor, who had taken up a sculptural pose in the middle of the drive, stared intensely at us with his cold expressionless eyes, one of them dark and the other light blue, Perotti started to apologize. He was sorry to have kept us waiting, he said, but it wasn’t his fault; the trouble was the electric power, that sometimes failed (luckily signorina Micol had noticed and sent him straight off to see whether we’d turned up, by any chance), and the distance-over half a kilometre, no less. He couldn’t ride a bike, but once the signorina got something into her head... .

He sighed, raised his eyes to heaven, smiled once more for some reason, his thin lips parting to show a set of teeth much sounder and more complete than Yor’s; and pointed out the drive that after about a hundred yards continued through a thicket of rattan canes.

Even with a bike-he warned us-it always took three or four minutes, just to get to the “mansion”.

We
were really very lucky with the weather.

For ten or twelve days it stayed perfect, strung in a kind of roagical suspense, a glassy, glowing stillness and sweetness peculiar to some of our autumns. It was hot in the garden: almost like summer. Anyone who liked to could carry on playing tennis until half-past five or later, without any risk of the evening dampness, so lethal in November, damaging the racket strings. By that hour, of course, you could hardly see on the court. But the light still gilded the grassy slopes of the Wall of the Angels below there, distant slopes that, especially on Sundays, were crowded with boys chasing balls, nurses knitting beside their prams, soldiers off duty, courting couples looking for a place to cuddle; and this final bit of daylight urged us to carry on, knocking up even if we were playing almost blind. The day was not yet over, it was still worth staying a little longer.