The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (10 page)
We came back every afternoon, at first ringing up beforehand, and then not even doing that; and always the same group, with the exception, now and then, of Giampiero Malnate, who had known Alberto in Milan since 1933, and, contrary to what I had thought the first day when I met him outside the Finzi-Continis’ gate, not only had never before seen the four young people he was with, but had nothing at all to do with the
Eleonora d’Este
tennis club or its vice-president and secretary, marchese Ippolito Barbicinti, either. The days seemed too glorious, yet somehow too much threatened by winter, now so close. It seemed a crime to lose a single one, and without arranging it, we always turned up at about two o’clock, straight after lunch. At the beginning we often met outside the gate, as we had done the first day, waiting for Perotti to come and open it. Later, after about a week, once the internal telephone and the lock that worked by remote control had been installed, we found getting into the garden was no longer a problem, and so as a rule we turned up in driblets, just as we happened to get there. I myself never missed an afternoon, even to make one of my usual bolts to Bologna. But neither did the others if I remember rightly: Bruno Lattes, Adriana Trentini, Carletto Sani, Tonino Collevatti, and, in the last few days, my brother Ernesto and three or four other boys and girls. The only one, as I said, who came less regularly was “that” Giampiero Malnate (it was Micol who started this way of calling him, putting the “that” before his name: and soon we all did). He had to keep factory hours: admittedly they weren’t very strict-he confessed one day-since the factory where he worked, which the Fascist regime had forced on the Montecatini at the time of the “iniquitous Sanctions”, and kept going purely for propaganda purposes, hadn’t produced a single kilo; but still, there were factory hours to keep. In any case, he was never away for more than a couple of days at a time. On the other hand he was the only one, apart from me, who wasn’t exaggeratedly keen on tennis (to be honest, he played pretty badly) and was often quite content, when he turned up on his bike after work, about five o’clock, to umpire a match or to sit a little way off, smoking his pipe and talking to his friend Alberto.
However things were with us, our hosts were even keener than we were. We might get there very early, when the distant piazza clock was still striking two, but however early we arrived we were sure to find them already on the court, never playing together now, as they had been that first Saturday when we came out on the clearing behind the house where the tennis court was, but checking that everything was in order, the net at the right height, the ground well rolled and watered, the balls in good condition, or else lying motionless on deck-chairs wearing large straw hats, sun-bathing. As hosts, they couldn’t have been better, quite honestly. Although obviously their interest in tennis purely as physical exercise, as a sport, was pretty moderate, they stayed on until the very last game-generally both of them and always at least one or the other-and never left early with the excuse that they had an engagement, or something to finish off, or weren’t feeling well. Sometimes, in fact, it was they who, in almost total darkness, kept insisting on us having “just another knock-up, the last!” and urging anyone who was leaving back on to the court.
The court, as Carletto Sani and Tonino Collevatti had noticed at once the first day, couldn’t really be called much good.
Being matter-of-fact fifteen-year-olds, too young to have ever trodden any courts but those marchese Bar-bicinti was so justifiably proud of, they had immediately, without even bothering to lower their voices so that the owners of the house shouldn’t hear, started listing the defects of this “potato patch” (as one of them put it, making a scornful face). These were: practically no surround, particularly behind the back lines; a white surface, terribly badly drained, which the least bit ofrain would turn into a swamp; and no evergreen hedge along the wire-netting fence.
But as soon as they finished their game (Micol couldn’t stop her brother catching up on her to make it five all: at which point they gave up) Alberto and Micol outdid each other in denouncing these same defects without the slightest reserve, in fact with a kind of sarcastic, self-wounding enthusiasm. Oh, of course -Micol said gaily, while she was still rubbing her hot face with a Turkish towel-for people like us, who were used to the red courts of the club, it must be very hard to feel comfortable in their dusty “potato patch” ! And then what about the surround? How could we play with so little space behind us? It was just too bad what we’d got down to, poor dears! But she had a perfectly clear conscience about it. She’d told her father endlesslv they’d got to move the netting at the ends at least three yards back, and at the sides about two yards. But there it was! Her father, with his typical farmer’s outlook, that considered anything uncultivated so much waste land, kept putting it off, counting on the fact that she and Alberto had played on a dump like that since they were children, they could jolly well carry on playing there when they were grown up. But things were different now; they had guests now, “very distinguished guests” : so that she’d go back into the fray with renewed energy, bothering and tormenting her “hoary parent” so much that by next spring there was a 99 per cent likelihood she and Alberto would be able to offer us “something decent” at last. She was grinning quite openly, so that there was nothing we could do but refute what she said, in chorus, and assure her that everything was fine as it was, that the court didn’t matter in the least and in any case it wasn’t at all bad, and to make up for it, we praised its surroundings, which meant the park, compared with which-it was Bruno Lattcs who said it: at the very moment in which, their “fight to the death” suspended, Micol and Alberto came up to us-the other privately owned parks in town, including duke Massari’s, faded into prettified suburban backyards.
But, quite honestly, the tenins court was not “decent”, and besides, as there wasjust a single one, it meant we had to rest too long between games. So, promptly at four every afternoon-above all, perhaps, to prevent the two fifteen-year-olds in our heterogeneous group regretting the much more intensive time, sportively speaking, they might be spending under marchese Barbicinti’s wing-Perotti invariably turned up, his bull-like neck stiff and red with the effort of carrying a large silver tray in his gloved hands.
And it was overflowing: with buttered anchovy rolls, and smoked salmon, and caviare, and
foie gras,
and ham; with little
vol-au-vents
stuffed with minced chicken in
bechamel
sauce; with minute
buricchi*
* A kind of Jewish pastry filed with mince or almond paste. which must have come from the expensive little kosher shop which signora Betsabea, the famous signora Betsabea (Da Fano), had kept for years in via Mazzini, to the delight and glory of the entire town. Nor was that all. Friend Perotti still had to lay the contents of the tray on the cane table specially prepared for it at theside entrance to the court, under a big umbrella with red and blue segments, and one of his daughters would come and join him, either Dirce or Gina, both about the same age as MicOl, and both maids “in the house”, Dirce as housemaid, Gina as cook (the two boys, Titta and Bepi, the first about thirty, the second eighteen, looked after the park, doing double duty in the flower and kitchen gardens. We had never managed to catch more than occasional glimpses of them in the distance, bending over their work, and as we shot past them on our bikes their ironical blue eyes turned on us, flashing). The daughter would come pulling a rubber-wheeled trolley loaded with carafes, jugs, glasses and cups, behind her along the path that led from the
magna domus
to the tennis court. In the jugs made of china and pewter there was tea, milk, and coffee; in the steamy carafes ofBohemian glass, lemonade, fruit juice, and
Skiwasser:
this last a thirst-quenching drink made of equal parts water and raspberry juice, with a slice of lemon and a few grapes thrown in, which Micol liked better than anything, and of which she was particularly proud.
Oh, that
Skiwasser!
In the pauses between games, Micol would bite into a roll that she always, not without a show of religious nonconformity, picked out among the ham ones and pour down a whole glass of her “dear old drink” at a go, urging us all the time to help ourselves, “in honour of the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire”, she laughed. The recipe, she told us, “had actually been given to her in Austria, at Offgastein, in the winter of ’34, the only winter in which she and Alberto, “in coalition”, had managed to get away for a fortnight’s skiing on their own. And although the
Skiwasser,
as the name showed, was a winter drink, and so should really be served boiling hot, even in Austria some people still took it this way in summer, in an iced “version”, and without lemon; in which case they called it
Himbeerwasser
instead.
But we should really note, she added, raising a finger with comical emphasis; the bits of grape-“terribly important” !-she herself, on her own initiative, had introduced into the classic Tyrolean recipe. It had been all her own idea: and she was really attached to it, it was no laughing matter. The grape represented Italy’s special contribution to the high, holy cause of
Ski-wasser,
or more precisely, the special “Italian variant, not to say Ferrarese, not to say . . . etc. etc.” .
Fuori corso
is the name given to students who for some reason do not manage to finish their course in the prescribed number of years, but continue to attend the university while waiting to pass their exams. The signatures Micol no longer has to worry about are those which the students have to obtain from their teachers at the end of each term.
The other members of the household took a little longer to be seen.
As far as they were concerned, in fact, an odd thing happened on the first day, which, when I remembered it about the middle of the following week, when neither professor Ermanno nor signora Olga had yet appeared, made me suspect that those Adriana Trentini lumped together as the “old guard” had unanimously decided to steer clear of the tennis court: perhaps so as not to embarrass us, so as not to change the nature of parties that were not really parties at all, but just a matter of youngsters getting together in the garden.
This odd thing happened right at the beginning, shortly after we were greeted by Perotti and Y or, who stayed there gazing after us as we cycled away along the drive. Having crossed the Panfilio canal by a peculiar, hefty black girder bridge, our cycling patrol got to within a hundred yards of the solitary neo-Gothic pile of the
magna domus,
or rather of a gloomy, gravelled open space entirely in shadow that opened up in front of it, and everyone’s attention was drawn to two people right in the middle of this space: an old lady sitting in an armchair, propped up by a pile of cushions, and a buxom young blonde, who looked like a maid, standing behind her. As soon as she had seen us approaching, the old lady was seized by a kind of trembling, after which she immediately began making terrific signals with her arms, which meant no, we mustn’t come any farther, we mustn’t come across towards the gravel where she was, as there was nothing but the house behind her; we must turn left, along the path covered by an archway of climbing roses which she showed us, at the end of which (Micol and Alberto were already playing: couldn’t we hear, from where we were, the regular thud of their rackets as they hit the ball?) we would automatically find the tennis court. It was signora Regina Herrera, signora Olga’s mother. I recognized her at once from the peculiar intense whiteness of her thick hair gathered round a pad at the back, hair I had always admired every time I happened to catch a glimpse of it through the grating of the woman’s part at the synagogue. She waved her arms and hands with petulant energy, at the same time making a sign to the girl, who turned out to be Dirce, to help her up: she was tired ofbeing there, and wanted to go indoors. And the maid obeyed zealously, at once.
One evening, all the same, against all our expectations, professor Ermanno and signora Olga did turn up. They looked as if they were passing the tennis court just by chance, after a long walk in the park. They were arm in arm. He, shorter than his wife, and very much more bent than he had been ten years before, at the time of our whispered talks from bench to bench in the Italian synagogue, was wearing one of his usual pale, light-weight linen suits, with a black ribboned panama hat pulled down over his thick pince-nez, and, as he walked, leaning on a bamboo cane. She, all in black, was carrying a large bunch of chrysanthemums obviously picked in some remote part of the garden, during their walk. She held them clasped sidelong to her bosom, holding them in her right arm in a tenderly possessive, almost maternal way. Although she was still straight, and a fuil head taller than her husband, she too seemed to have aged a great deal. Her hair had become completely grey, an ugly, dismal grey; under her bony, jutting forehead, her intensely black eyes still glittered with the same fanatical, sickly glow as before.
