The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (14 page)

I remember it well: an uninterrupted downpour for days on end-and then it would be winter, the gloomy relentless winter of the northern plain-that made any further time spent in the garden seem unlikely. And yet, in spite of the change in the weather, everything went on in much the same way, and I managed to delude myself that nothing, substantially, had changed.

At half-past two on the day after our last visit to the Finzi-Continis’, in fact-about the time we had usually been seen emerging, one after the other, from the arcade of climbing roses with cries of “hello!” or “Hi” or “your servant” -the telephone rang for me at home, and, across the squalls of rain pouring down over the entire city, I was again in touch, just the same, with Micol’s voice. That same evening I rang her; and she rang up again the following afternoon. We managed to carry on talking exactly the way we had been doing those last few days, thankful now, as we had been thankful then, to be left alone by Bruno Lattes, Adriani Trentini, Giampiero Malnate and all the others, to be given no sign of being remembered by them. And anyway, when had we even thought of them, Micol and I, in our long meanderings about the park, first on bicycles and then on foot: meanderings so long that sometimes, when we got back, we found not a living soul either on the tennis court or in the
Hiitte?

Followed, as a rule, by anxious glances from my parents, I would shut myself in the tiny telephone room, and dial the number: and often it was Micol who answered at once ; so quickly, too, that I thought she must have the receiver continually by her.

“Where are you speaking from?” I tried asking.

She burst out laughing.

“Well . . . from home, I suppose.”

“Thanks for telling me. But what I really wanted to know was how you manage to answer so quickly: tick-tock, just like that. How d’you do it? D’you have your ’phone on the desk like a tycoon? Or d’you prowl round the telephone from morning till night, like the caged tiger in Machaty’s
Nocturne?”

I sensed a slight hesitation on the other end of the line. If she got to the telephone before the others-she answered-it was only because of the legendary efficiency of her muscular reflexes, that’s all; and her natural intuition, of course, which meant that every time I got the notion of ringing her she happened to be passing the telephone. Then she changed the subject. How was my thesis on Panzacchi going? And what about Bologna, when was I going to start my old trips back and forth, if only for a change of air?

But sometimes it was the others who answered: Alberto, or professor Ermanno, or one of the two maids, and once even signora Regina, who had surprisingly sharp ears on the telephone. In these cases I could hardly avoid giving my name, of course, and saying I wanted to speak to “signorina” Micol. But after a few days (at first the whole business embarrassed me dreadfully, but gradually I got used to it), after a few days all I had to say was “Hello” into the receiver and whoever was on the other end passed me on quickly, without even asking whom I wanted to speak to. Even when Alberto came on the line, he did this; and Micol was always there at once, ready to grab the receiver from whoever had it: just as if the whole lot of them were gathered together in a single room, living-room, drawing-room, library, or whatever it was, each of them deep in a big leather armchair, with the telephone just a few yards away. Really, I came to suspect that. And to warn Micol, who suddenly looked up when the telephone rang (I seemed to see her), all they did, very likely, was hold out the receiver from a distance, Alberto adding a wink of his own, perhaps, half affectionate and half sardonic.

One day I ventured to ask her to confirm whether I was right, and she listened to me in silence.

“Isn’t that the way it is?” I asked.

But it wasn’t. Seeing I was determined to get at the truth-she said-well, here it was: each of them had a line to his own room (after she’d got one for herself, the rest of the family had ended up getting one as well): it was terrifically useful, and really she recommended it, because you could ring anyone up at any hour of the day or night without bothering anyone else or being bothered, and-just think !-without moving a step out of bed at night. What an amazing idea !-she then exclaimed, laughing. What on earth had put it into my head that they all sat around together the whole time, like people in an hotel lounge? Why ever should they? Anyway it was odd I hadn’t noticed the click of the extension switch when she didn’t answer me first go.

“No,” she said firmly. “To protect your own freedom, there’s nothing like a good private line. Honestly, you ought to get one for yourself, in your own bedroom. Imagine the chats I’d have with you, especially at night !”

“So you’re ringing from your bedroom now.”

“Certainly. And in bed, at that.”

It was eleven o’clock in the morning. “You’re not exactly an early bird,” I said.

“Oh heavens, you, too!” she moaned. “It’s all very well for Papa, aged seventy, and with all he’s got on his plate, to get up at half-past six because, so he says, he wants to set us a good example and stop the rot of all this soft living; but when one’s best friends start wagging reproving fingers that really seems a bit much. D’you know I’ve been on my feet since seven o’clock this morning? And you dare to be surprised at catching me back in bed at eleven! Besides, I don’t sleep, you know; I read, scribble a few lines ofthe old thesis, look outside. I’ve always got masses to do when I’m in bed. Being snug under the blankets makes me madly busy.”

“Describe your room,” I said.

She clicked her tongue against her teeth several times, meaning no.

“No, never.
Verboten. Privat.
If you like I can describe what I'm looking at through the window.”

From her first-floor window she could see the feathery tops of her
Washingtoniae graciles,
which the wind and the rain were lashing “shamelessly”, and you couldn’t tell if Titta and Bepi’s efforts-they’d already started binding up their trunks with their usual winter petticoats ofstraw-you couldn't tell, anyway, whether these efforts would stop them freezing to death during the next few months, which seemed likely enough every winter, but so far they’d managed to avoid, praise be. Then farther on, hidden in places by tufts of drifting fog, she saw the four Castle towers, which the pouring rain had turned the colour of charcoal. And behind the towers, a kind of spooky whiteness occasionally hidden by the fog, the distant marble front and campanile ofthe cathedral. . . . Oh, the fog! When it looked like that, like dirty rags, she didn’t like it a bit. But the rain would stop sooner or later: and then the morning mist pierced by the feeble rays of sunlight would turn into something precious, and delicately opalescent, with shifting reflections like all those of the
lattimi*
 * Objects made of milk-coloured glass are called 
lattimi,
 but the word makes the narrator think of foods: hence his question a few lines later.]  she had the room full of. Winter was a bore, of course, because it stopped you playing tennis, among other things, but it had its compensations. “And there’s no situation, however sad and dreary it is,” she concluded, “that hasn’t got some underlying compensations, and often very big ones.”

“Lattimi ?”
I asked. “What’s that? Something to eat?”

“Oh no, no,” she moaned, horrified by my ignorance, as usual. “It’s glass: drinking glasses, chalices, bottles, tiny bottles, small boxes: little things, usually chucked out by dealers. In Venice they call them 
lattimi:
outside Venice they’re called
opalines,
or
flutes. 
You can’t imagine how I
adore
this stuff. I know
every single thing
there is to know about them. Ask me and you’11 see. ’ ’

It was at Venice-she went on-perhaps inspired by their local mists, which were so different from our gloomy Po Valley fogs, infinitely vaguer and more luminous (only one painter on earth had managed to “get” them: “our own” De Pisis, far more than the later Monet), it was at Venice that she had begun being keen on
lattimi.
She spent hours and hours going round the antique shops; and there were some, especially in the direction of San Samuele, around campo Santo Stefano, or else in the ghetto, down there towards the station, which sold practically nothing else. Uncle Giulio and Uncle Federico lived in the calle del Cristo, near San Moise. Towards evening, having nothing else to do, and of course with signorina Blumenfeld the housekeeper in tow (a lady-like
jode
in her sixties from Frankfurt-on-Main, who’d been in Italy for over thirty years: and a real old drear!), she would pop out on a /attimi-hunt in calle XXII March. Campo Santo Stefano’s only a few steps from San Moise. But not San Geremia, where the ghetto is; if you go through

San Bartolomio and the Lista di Spagna, it’s at least half an hour’s walk from San Moise, but it’sjust round the corner if you cross the Grand Canal at palazzo Grassi, and then carry on along the Frari. . . . But to go back to the
lattimi.
What a “rhabdoromantic ’’shiver she had every time she managed to dig out something new and rare! How many pieces did I think she’d managed to collect? Nearly two hundred. I was careful not to point out how this hardly tallied with her avowed dislike of trying to save things, objects, from the inevitable death that awaited “them as well”, and in particular of Perotti's mania for preserving them. What I wanted was to make her talk about her room; I wanted her to forget she had said:
verboten, privat,
a short while ago.

And I got my way. She went on talking about her
lattimi
(she had set them out on three high sets of dark mahogany shelves that covered almost the entire wall opposite the one her bed stood against); and as she spoke the room, whether with or without her realizing it, started taking shape, and gradually all its details became clear as well.

Well then, to get things straight: there were two windows. Both faced south, and were so high above the floor that when you looked out over the sill, with the park spread below, and the roofs spreading beyond the park as far as you could see, it felt like looking out from the deck of an ocean liner. Between the two windows stood a fourth set of shelves: for French and English books. Up against the left-hand window was a desk with a green baize top and a lamp, and beside it a small table with a typewriter on it and a fifth bookcase, the one where she kept her books ofltalian literature, classics and modern works, and her translations, mostly from the Russian, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Chekhov. On the floor was a large Persian carpet, and in the middle of the room, which was long but rather narrow, three armchairs and a Re-camier sofa, to lie on and read. There were two doors: one the entrance, at the end of the room beside the left-hand window, giving directly on to the staircase and the lift, and another just by the opposite corner of the room, leading into the bathroom. At night she slept without ever closing the shutters completely, and a little lamp always alight above the bedside table, and the trolley with the thermos of
Skiwasser
-and the telephone-so near as well that all she had to do was stretch out an arm if she wanted it. If she awoke at night all she did was take a sip of
Skiwasser
(it was
so 
useful to have something “nice and hot” always there: why didn’t I get a thermos for myself as well?) and then, when she lay down again, she gazed around at the gleaming mistiness of her beloved
lattimi,
and sleep, as unobtrusive as high tide in Venice, came gently back to submerge and “exterminate” her.

But these weren’t our only topics of conversation.

As if she too wanted to delude me into thinking that nothing had changed, that everything between us was just as it had been “before”, when we could see each other every afternoon, Micol lost no opportunity of taking me back to that series of stupendous, “incredible” days.

We had talked of so many things, then, as we wandered about the park: about trees, and plants, about our childhood, our families. And meantime Bruno Lattes, Adriana Trentini, “that” Malnate, Carletto Sani, Tonino Collevatti, and the others who had come along later, were mentioned only very briefly and occasionally, and even referred to now and then in a hasty and rather scornful way as “that lot”.

But now, on the telephone, our talk kept going back to them, especially to Bruno Lattes and Adriana Tren-tini, between whom, according to Micol, there was definitely
something.
Oh, come now !-she kept saying to me: could I possibly not have realized that they were going steady? Why, it was perfectly obvious! He never took his eyes off her for a moment, and she too, although she treated him like a slave, and flirted a bit with everyone, with me, and that bear Malnate, and even with Alberto, even she went along with him, when you got down to it.
Dear
Bruno ! With his sensitivity (faintly morbid, you must admit: all you need do to see that was watch the way he worshipped, quite literally, two nice little morons like Sani and Colle-vatti, heaven help us!), with his sensibility he had some pretty uneasy months ahead of him, given the present situation. There was no doubt Adriana felt the same (one evening in the
Hutte,
in fact, she had seen them half lying on the sofa, kissing away for all they were worth), but whether she was the type to carry on with anything so difficult, in the face of the racial laws and his family and hers, was another matter. No, Bruno hadn’t an easy winter ahead of him. Not that Adriana was a bad girl, of course not! Nearly as tall as Bruno, blonde, with that marvellous Carole Lombard skin of hers, at any other time she might have been just the girl for Bruno, who obviously liked “real Arians”. But there was no denying she was a bit flighty and empty-headed, and unconsciously cruel as well. Didn’t I remember the way she glared at poor wretched Bruno that time they lost the famous return match against

Desiree Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo? It was really she who’d lost the match, with those endless double faults of hers-at least three in every game-far more than Bruno! And yet she was so completely thoughtless that throughout the whole match she did nothing but yelp at him, as if he, “poor soul”, wasn’t already depressed and cast-down enough on his own account. It would really have been funny, if it hadn’t turned out so sour! But there, it was always the way: moralists like Bruno never failed to fall for geese like Adriana: which meant jealous scenes, snoopings, surprises, tears, promises, even blows and . . . horns, quite honestly, that’s what it came to. No, no: after all, Bruno ought to thank his stars for the racial laws. He was going to have a difficult winter, it was true. But the racial laws, which weren’t always such a bad thing, as it turned out, would prevent him doing the stupidest thing of all: getting engaged.