The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (12 page)

Thinking of Meldolesi, I couldn’t help smiling. What about the essay to send to the
Nuova Antologia
? After all his talk, hadn’t he cooked up anything? Poor Meldolesi: a few years ago he had been transferred to the Minghetti school at Bologna-delighted, of course! Some day or other I must really go along and see him. . . .

In spite of the darkness, professor Ermanno realized I was smiling.

“Oh, I know, I know,” he said, “you youngsters haven’t taken Giosue Carducci very seriously for some time now. I know perfectly well you even prefer Pas-coli or D’Annunzio.”

It was easy to persuade him that I had smiled for quite another reason-that is, from disappointment. If only I’d known there were some unpublished letters of Carducci’s in Ferrara! Instead of suggesting a thesis on Panzacchi to Professor Calcaterra, as unfortunately I’d already done, I could perfectly well have suggested a “Ferrarese Carducci”, of undoubtedly greater interest. But maybe, if I spoke frankly to professor Calcaterra, who was extremely nice, maybe I could stil manage to change over from Panzacchi to Carducci without losing too much face.

“When will you be getting your degree?” professor Ermanno asked me at last.

“Well, in June next year, I hope. But don’t forget I’m/Mon
corso*
myself”

He nodded several times, in silence.

“Are you?” he sighed, at last. “Well, nothing wrong with that.”

And he made a vague gesture with his hand, as if to say that, with what was happening, we had plenty of time before us, his children and I; too much, in fact.

But my father was right: basically he didn’t seem to mind very much about it at all. On the contrary.

* See note on page 66.

Micol wanted to be the one to show me the garden. She was quite determined. “I think I’ve a right to!” she grinned, looking at me. Not the first day. I had played tennis until late, and it was Alberto, when he had stopped playing with his sister, who took me to a kind of miniature Alpine hut half-hidden in the middle of a copse of fir trees and about a hundred yards from the tennis court (Hiitte, he and Micol called it), in which hut or Hiitte, which was used as a changing room, I was able to change, and then, in the gathering darkness, take a warm shower and dress.

But the following day things went differently. We played doubles, with Adriani Trentini and Bruno Lattes against the two youngest boys (Malnate, sitting up high on the umpire’s chair, playing the patient score-keeper), and it soon started to look like one of those matches that never come to an end.

“What shall we do?” Micol said to me suddenly, jumping up. “I’ve got a feeling that before taking over from these four you and I and Alberto and our friend from Milan will have to wait a good hour. Listen: why don’t we take the chance of a first look round the garden?” As soon as the court was free-she went on-Alberto would obviously remember us and give us a call. He’d pop three fingers in his mouth and produce one of his famous whistles.

She turned to Alberto, who was dozing there beside us on a third deck-chair in the sun, his face hidden under a countryman’s straw hat.

“Hey, you old pasha, that’s true, isn’t it?”

Without disarranging himself, Alberto nodded.

We went off. Yes, her brother was terrific-Micol went on to explain. When they were needed, he could bring out such powerful whistles that the kind shepherds made were just footling, by comparison. Wasn’t it odd?-somcone like him. You’d never think so, to look at him. And yet. . . . The mystery was where he got all that breath from!

Thus, nearly always to avoid waiting between games, we started our long excursions together.

At first we used to take our bicycles. A bike was indispensable-Micol decided straight away-ifl wanted to get a clear enough idea of the whole place. The garden was about ten hectares, and the roads through it, large and small, added up to six kilometres all together. But apart from that, without bikes it would have been out of the question to get far enough west, for instance, to see where she and Alberto as children used to go and watch the trains shunting in the station ! If we walked as far as that we might hear Alberto’s “fog-horn” and not be able to get back fast enough.

So that first day we went to watch the trains shunting in the station. And then? Then we went back. We went round the tennis court, crossed the open space in front of the
magna domus
(deserted, as usual, and sadder than ever), and, beyond the black girder bridge over the Panfilio canal, went back along the drive as far as the tunnel of rattan canes and the gate on to Corso Ercole I. There, Micol insisted on our turning left, along a path that followed the entire garden wall; at first on the side of the Wall of the Angels, so that in a quarter of an hour we came back to the side of the park from which you could see the station; and then on the opposite side, which was much more wooded, and rather glum and melancholy, running along the whole length of the deserted via Arianuova. We were there, in fact, toiling through clumps of ferns, stinging nettles, and thorn bushes, when suddenly, across the thick barrier of tree-trunks, came Alberto’s shepherd whistle, enormously far away, calling us quickly back to “hard labour”.

With a few variations of the route, we explored extensively again, three or four times, in the afternoons that followed.

When the roads and paths were wide enough to allow it we pedalled along side by side. I often rode holding on with one hand, resting the other on her handlebars. In the meantime we talked: about trees, mostly, at least at the beginning.

I knew nothing about them, or practically nothing, which never ceased to astonish Micol. She looked at me as if I were a monster.

“How can you possibly be so ignorant?” she kept exclaiming. “Why, you must have done a bit ofbotany at school, even!”

“Now, sir,” she would ask, already preparing to raise her eyebrows in the face of some new enormity, “let’s hear just what sort of tree you’d say that one over there was?”

She could name them all: from honest elms and home-grown limes to the rarest exotic plants, African, Asian, American, that only a specialist could have identified; since there was everything at Barchetto del Duca, simply everything. I always answered at random, in any case: partly because I was really quite unable to tell an elm from a lime, and partly because I realized there was nothing she enjoyed so much as hearing me make these howlers.

It seemed absurd to her that someone like me should exist in the world, someone who wholly lacked her own feeling of passionate admiration for trees, “great, strong, and thoughtful trees”. How could I fail to 
understand
? How could I go on living without
feeling
? At the end of the tennis court clearing, for instance, west of the court, there was a group of seven very tall slim
Washingtoniae graciles,
or desert palms, isolated from the rest of the growth behind them (dark trees with thick trunks, European forest trees: oaks, holm oaks, plane trees, horse-chestnuts), with a fine stretch of grass around them. Well, every time we passed in that direction on our bicycles, Micol always had some new loving thing to say about the
Washingtoniae.

“There they are, my seven old darlings,” she might say. “Look at those impressive old beards of theirs!”

Seriously-she insisted-didn’t they seem to me, even to me, like the seven hermits of the Thebaid, dried by the sun and by fasting? What elegance, what “holiness”, in their dark, dry, bent, scaly trunks! Honestly, they looked like the legs of so many John the Baptists, fed on nothing but locusts.

But it wasn’t only the exotic trees she liked: the palms of various species, the
Howaeniae dulces,
which produced deformed tubers full of a honey-flavoured pulp, the American aloe shaped like the candelabra of the
menorah,
which-she told me-flowered only once every twenty or twenty-five years, and then died; the eucalyptus, the
Zelkoviae sinicae,
with their small green trunks flecked with gold (she never told me why, but she felt curiously uneasy about the eucalyptus, as if through the years something not at all pleasant had happened between them and her, something that mustn’t be brought up again).

For an enormous plane tree, with a whitish, blotchy trunk thicker than that of almost any other tree in the garden, and, I think, the whole province, her admiration overflowed into reverence. Of course, it wasn’t “grandmotherJosette” who had planted it; but Ercole I d’Este himself, maybe, or Lucretia Borgia.

“D’you realize? It’s nearly five hundred years old!” she murmured, her eyes widening. “Just imagine all the things it must have seen, since it came into the world!”

And it seemed as if it had eyes like ours, the great ugly beast, that gigantic old plane tree: eyes to see us as well as ears to hear us.

For the fruit trees, too, that grew on a wide strip of land right below the Wall of the Angels, sheltered from the north winds and open to the sun, Micol felt an affection-I had noticed-very much like hers for Perotti and all the members of his family. She talked to me about those humble domestic trees with the same kindliness and the same patience; and very often bringing out a bit of dialect, the dialect which, in dealing with people, she used only with Perotti, or Titta and Bepi, when we happened to meet them and stopped to exchange a few words. Her custom, every time, was to pause at a large plum tree, with foliage as thick and trunk as powerful as an oak: her favourite. The sour plums,
i brogn serbi,
it produced-she told me-had seemed to her extraordinary as a child. In those days she preferred them to any Lindt chocolates. Then, when she was about sixteen she suddenly stopped wanting them, and didn’t like them any more, and now she preferred chocolate, Lindt or non-Lindt (but bitter chocolate, only the bitter stuff!). She called apples i
pum,
figs i
figh,
apricots i
mugnagh,
and peaches
i per-sagh.
Only dialect was suitable when she spoke of these things. Only dialect words allowed her, when she spoke of trees and fruit, to twist her lips in the half tender, half scornful expression prompted by the heart.

Later, when the trips of inspection were done, we started on our “pious pilgrimages”. And since all pilgrimages, according to Micol, must be made on foot (else whatever sort of pilgrimages were they?), we stopped using bicycles, and went on foot, almost always accompanied, step by step, by Yor.

To start with I was taken to see a small solitary landing-stage on the Panfilio canal, hidden among a thick growth of willows, white poplars, and arum lilies. From that minute wharf, with a mossy red-brick bench running all round it, you could very likely, in the old days, sail along to the River Po and the Castle Moat. And she and Alberto used to sail off from there when they were children-Micol told me-and row away for ages in a canoe with two paddles. They’d never actually got to the foot of the Castle towers, in the middle of town, in their boat (as I knew, nowadays the Panfilio canal reached the Castle Moat underground). But they’d got to the River Po, right opposite the Isola Bianca! Did I like the place? she asked finally. Actually they couldn’t think of using the canoe any longer: it had fallen to bits, and was reduced to a kind of dust-covered “ghost ship”; some day, if she remembered to take me, I could see its carcass in the coach-house. But she’d always gone on using the harbour bench: always, always. It was her secret refuge. It was an ideal place, apart from everything else, to come and work peacefully for exams, when it started getting hot.

Another time we ended up at the Perottis’. They lived in a real tenant farmer’s house, with hayloft and cowshed, half-way between the big house and the fruit trees dominated by the Wall of the Angels.

We were received by old Perotti’s wife, Vittorina, a faded
arzdora*
 [
*
 “Housewife”: Ferrarese dialect ]of indefinable age, sad and cadaverously thin, and by Italia, the wife of the eldest son, Titta, a strong fat woman of thirty from Codigoro with watery blue eyes and red hair. She sat at the front door on a straw chair, surrounded by chickens, giving suck, and Micol bent down to caress the baby.

‘‘Well now, when are you going to ask me to eat your bean soup again?” she asked Vittorina, in dialect.

“Whenever you like,
sgnurina.
So long as you’re happy . . .”

“We really must, one of these days. Vittorina makes the most
terrific
bean soup,” she said, turning to me. “With bacon, of course. . . .”

She laughed, and then:

“Like to have a look at the cowshed? We’ve got six cows, no less.”

Vittorina went ahead, and we followed her to the cowshed. The
arzdora
opened the door with a large key she kept in the pocket of her black apron, then stood aside to let us in. As we went into the cowshed, I realized she was looking furtively at us: worried, I felt, and secretly satisfied.

A third pilgrimage was given over to the place sacred to the
“vert paradis des amours enfantines".