The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (17 page)

He ahead and I behind, we crossed at least a dozen rooms of varying sizes, some as large as real stately drawing-rooms, some tiny and linked, at times, by passages which were not always straight or on the same level. At last, when we were half-way down one of these passages, professor Ermanno stopped outside a door.

“Here we are,” he said, gestured at the door with his thumb, and winked.

He apologized for not coming in, because-he explained-he had to look through some accounts from the country; he promised to “send one of the maids up with something hot right away”; after which, having shaken my hand, and had my assurance that I would come again (he still had the copies ofhis little historical works on Venice waiting for me, I mustn’t forget!; and besides, he did so much enjoy spending a little time now and then “with intelligent young people”), he turned away, walked down the passage, and vanished quickly at the end of it.

“Ah, here you are,” said Alberto, when he saw me come in.

He was deep in an armchair. He stood up by pushing with both hands on the arms, laid the book he was reading open and face downwards on a low table beside him, and then came over to me.

He was wearing grey vicuna trousers, one of his beautiful pullovers, a kind of dry-leaf colour, brown English shoes (real Dawsons, he told me afterwards: he found them in Milan, in a small shop near San Babila), and an open-necked flannel shirt without a tie; and had his pipe between his teeth. He shook hands, not looking noticeably friendly, and stared at a point behind me in the meantime. What was attracting his attention? I didn’t understand.

“Excuse me,” he murmured.

Leaning out sideways, willowy as he was, he pushed past me, and in that same moment I realized I had left the double door half open. But Alberto was already there, seeing to it himself. He took the handle of the outside door, but before drawing it towards him poked his head out into the passage, for a look.

“What about Malnate?” I asked. “Hasn’t he come yet?”

“No, not yet,” he said, coming back towards me.

He got me to hand over my hat, scarf and overcoat, and disappeared into the little room next door. And so I was able to sec something ofit through the door: part of the bed, with a red-and-blue-checked woollen counterpane on it, a leather pouffe at the foot of the bed, and, on the wall beside a small door opening into the bathroom, halfopen as well, a small male nude by De Pisis in a simple light-wood frame.

“Sit down,” Alberto said, meantime. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

And in fact he reappeared at once, and now, sitting in front of me, in the armchair I had seen him pull himself out of a little earlier with a very faint show of weariness, perhaps of boredom, he considered me with the curious expression of detached friendliness, an objective look I knew meant he was as interested as he possibly could be in somebody else. He smiled at me, showing the large incisors inherited from his mother’s family, which were too big and strong for his long pale face and for the gums above them, which were no less bloodless than his face.

“Would you like to hear some music?” he suggested, indicating a radiogram that stood in a corner by the door. “It’s a Philips, and really first class.”

He made a movement to get up from the armchair again, but I stopped him.

"No, wait,” I said. “Later perhaps.”

I gazed about, taking in the room.

“What records have you got?”

“Oh, a bit of everything: Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. I’ve got quite a lot ofjazz too, don’t worry: Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, Charlie Kunz. . . .”

He went on mentioning names and tides, polite and equable as ever, but indifferently: neither more nor less than if he were asking me to choose from a list of dishes, which he personally would be very careful not to taste. He came alive-moderately so-only to describe the virtues of
his
Philips. It was, he told me, a “pretty exceptional” machine, because of various changes he’d worked out and got going with the help of a really good mechanic in Milan, to do with the quality of the sound, above all. There wasn’t just a single amplifier, but four distinct ones: one for the bass sounds, one for the middle sounds, one for the high sounds, and one for the very high, so that anything coming through this very high one, even whistles, say -and he giggled-“came through” perfectly. But I mustn’t imagine they were all four of them stuck there togethcr-oh, no!
Inside
the radiogram there were only two: middle sounds and high. The very high amplifier he’d thought ofhiding over there by the window, and the fourth, the bass one, was right under the sofa I was sitting on: all this so as to give a certain stereophonic effect.

At that moment Dirce came in, wearing a blue linen dress and a white apron tight at the waist, and pulling the tea trolley along behind her.

I saw Alberto look faintly annoyed. The girl must have noticed it too.

“It was the master,” she justified herself, “who told me to bring it right away.”

“It’s all right. Itjust means we’ll have a cup,
in the meantime
.”

Fair and curly-haired, with the rosy cheeks you find in Venetians from the foothills of the Alps, and downcast eyes, Perotti’s daughter silently arranged the cups on the small table and left. A pleasant smell of soap and talcum powder hung about the room. Even the tea, it seemed to me, tasted faintly of it.

As I sipped, I kept looking about me. I admired the way the room was furnished in such a rational, functional, and modern way, so radically unlike the rest of the house, but I couldn’t understand why a gradually growing feeling ofuneasiness, ofoppression, was creep-mg over me.

“D’you like the way I’ve fixed up the studio?” Alberto asked.

He seemed suddenly anxious for my approval: which I didn’t stint, of course, praising the simplicity of the furniture, getting up from the sofa to look more closely at the large drawing-board that stood at an angle by the window surmounted by a perfectly articulated metal lamp, and finally saying how especially I approved of the indirect lighting, which I thought very restful and at the same time extremely good for work-mg m.

He let me carry on and seemed pleased.

“Did you design the furniture?” I asked.

“Well, no: I copied it-a bit from
Domus
and from
Casabella,
and a bit from the
Studio,
you know, that English magazine. . . . Then I had them made here at Ferrara, by a little man in via Coperta.”

He was delighted, he went on, to hear I approved of his furniture. What point was there in living or working surrounded with hideous objects or simply with junk? Giampi Malnate (he blushed faintly, as he named him), Giampi Malnate kept insinuating that the studio, fixed up like this, was more like a
garconniere
than a studio, and, as a good communist, he thought that anyway
things,
in themselves, were at the most just palliatives, temporary ersatz substitutes, and he was on principle against palliatives and substitutes of every kind, and even against technique, whenever it seemed to be saying that a drawer that shut perfectly, just to give an example, solved all a man’s problems, moral and political included. Whereas he-and he indicated his own chest-he thought otherwise. Though he respected Giampi’s opinions (yes, he was a communist: didn’t I know?), he felt that life was already so muddled and dreary that there was no reason why furniture and fittings, those silent, faithful indoor companions, should be muddled and dreary as well.

It was the first and last time I saw him get excited, and wave the flag for certain ideas instead of certain others. We drank a second cup of tea, but the conversation now languished, so much so that we had to turn to music.

We listened to a couple of records. Dirce came back, bringing a tray of small cakes, and at last, at about seven, the telephone on the desk opposite the drawing-board rang.

“What d’you bet that’s Giampi?” muttered Alberto, dashing over to it.

Before he picked up the receiver he hesitated a moment: like a player who, having got his cards, puts off the moment when he looks squarely at his luck.

It was in fact Malnate, as I realized at once.

“Well then, what are you up to? Aren’t you coming?” said Alberto regretfully, his voice almost childishly disappointed.

Malnate talked on for some time. From the sofa, though I couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying, I heard the instrument vibrating under his thick, placid, Lombard voice. Finally I heard a
“ciao”
and he rang off.

“He’s not coming,” said Alberto.

He went slowly back to his armchair, dropped into it, stretched, yawned.

“It seems he’s been held up at the factory,” he went on, “and he'll be there for another two or three hours. He apologized, and asked me to say hello to you as well.”

Rather more than the generic “see you soon” which I exchanged with Alberto when I left him, it was a letter from Micol I got a few days later that persuaded me to return.

It was a gay little letter, not too long and not too short, written on both sides of two sheets ofblue paper which her dashing but light handwriting had filled quickly, without hesitations or corrections. She began by apologizing: she had left suddenly, and hadn’t even said good-bye, which wasn’t exactly the thing, she was quite ready to admit. Before leaving she had tried to ring me up, without finding me at home, though, alas; and so she had told Alberto he was to chase me up if I happened never to turn up again. If I’d really vanished, had Alberto done what he’d solemnly sworn, and got hold of me at the peril of his life? He always ended up by dropping everyone, with that famous old phlegm of his, but I couldn’t imagine how much he needed people, poor soul ! The letter went on for another two and a half pages, talking about the thesis, which was now “getting near the winning post”, saying that Venice in winter “just made one cry”, and ending up surprisingly with a verse translation of a poem by Emily Dickinson.

It was this:

Morii per la Bellezza; e da poco ero discesa nellavello, che, caduto pel Vero, utzo fu messo nell attiguo sacello.

“Perche sei morta?” mi chiese sommesso.

Dissi: “Morii pel Bello.”

Io per la Verita: dunque e lo stesso,

-disse,-son tuo fratello”

Da tomba a tomba, come due congiunti incontratisi a notte, parlavamo cost; finche raggiunti l'erba ebbe nomi e bocche.
¹

He questioned softly why I failed?

“For beauty," I replied.

“And I for truth,-the two are one;

We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.

A postscript followed, saying:
“Alas, poor Emily.
²
See what compensations poor wretched spinsterhood is forced to!”

I liked the translation, but it was the postscript that struck me above all. Whom should I refer it to? To “poor Emily” herself, or to Micol feeling depressed and self-pitying?

In my reply I was careful once again to hide myself in a thick smokescreen. After mentioning my first visit to her house, with no mention of how disappointing I had found it and promising I would soon return, I stuck prudently to literature. Emily Dickinson’s poem was superb, I wrote, but her translation was really good too. What interested me about it was the fact that it was in a rather dated, Carduccian style. Then, dictionary in hand, I compared it with the English text, with the result that I found only one thing to quarrel with, and that was her translation of the word “moss” as 
“erba”.
She mustn’t misunderstand me, though: her translation was perfectly fine as it was, and in this kind of thing pleasing inaccuracy was always preferable to pedantic ugliness. In any case the defect I had pointed out was easily remedied. All it needed was a change in the last verse-something like this:

Da tomba a tomba, come due congiunti incontratisi a notte,

parlavamo: finche il mucchio raggiunti ebbe i nomi, le bocche.

Micol replied two days later, by telegram, thanking me very effusively for my literary advice, and then, the following day, she sent me a note by post with two new typewritten versions of the translation. I answered with a ten-page letter that dealt with hers point by point. All in all, we were far clumsier and more lifeless by letter than we were on the telephone, and so quite soon we stopped corresponding. But in the meantime I had continued visiting Alberto’s studio, regularly now, more or less every day.

Giampi Malnate came too, almost as eager and punctual as myself. Talking, arguing, often quarrelling-loving and hating at once, in fact, right from the very first minute-we quickly came to know each other well, and got on familiar terms.

I remembered what Micol had said about him “physically”. I too found “that” Malnate stout and oppressive; I too, like her, often felt real impatience at the sincerity, the loyalty, the eternal and obtrusive air of manly frankness, the placid trust in a communist Lombard future, that gleamed in his all too human grey eyes. In spite of this, from the first time I sat facing him in Alberto's studio, I had only one wish: that he should think well of me, that he shouldn’t think I came between him and Alberto, in fact that he shouldn’t consider the three of us, who now met every day, and certainly not through his initiative, an ill-assorted group. I think it was then that I too started smoking a pipe.