The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (26 page)

But the worst started for me only three weeks dater, when I got home from a trip I made to France during the second half of April.

I had gone to Grenoble for a very definite reason.

The few hundred lire a month we were legally allowed to send my brother Ernesto was only enough, as he kept telling us in his letters, to pay the rent ofhis room in place Vaucanson. So it was urgent to get him more money. And it was my father, one night when I got home later than usual (he had waited up for me-he said-on purpose to talk to me), who insisted on my taking it to him myself. Why didn’t I take the chance? Breathing a bit of air unlike our own, seeing people, having a change: all this would do me a world of good, physically as well as morally.

So I left. I stopped a couple of hours in Turin, and four at Chambery, and reached Grenoble at last. There, in the boarding-house where Ernesto went for meals, I was at once introduced to a number of Italians his own age, all in the same situation as himself and all of them students at the Polytechnic: a Levi from Turin, a Segre from Saluzzo, a Sorani from Trieste, a Cantoni from Mantua, a Castelnuovo from Florence, a Pin-cherle girl from Rome. But instead ofjoining up with them, I spent most of my twelve days there in the municipal library, looking at Stendhal manuscripts. It was cold in Grenoble, and it rained. The mountains looming over the town, only rarely showed their peaks, hidden in fog and cloud, while in the evenings the exercises with total blackout discouraged one from going out. Ferrara seemed terribly far: as if I never had to go back to it. And what about Micol? Since I left, her voice was always in my ears, the voice she used when she said: “Why d’you behave like that? In any case, it’s no use.” But one day something happened. I chanced to read in one of Stendhal’s notebooks the words:
AH lost, nothing lost,
and quite suddenly, as ifby a miracle, I felt freed, cured. I got a picture postcard, wrote Stendhal’s words on it, and sent it off to Micol, just like that, without a greeting, without even a signature, for her to make what she liked of it. All lost, nothing lost. How true it was !-I said to myself. And I breathed again.

I was deluding myself, of course. When I went back to Italy at the beginning ofMay I found spring bursting out everywhere, the sprawling fields between Alessandria and Piacenza already yellow, the country lanes of Emilia full of girls out on bicycles, already barearmed and bare-legged, the great trees along the walls of Ferrara already in leaf. I arrived on a Sunday about midday. As soon as I got home I had a bath, had lunch with the family, and answered a mass of questions pretty patiently. But the sudden frenzy that had seized me on the train the moment I saw the towers and belfries of Ferrara on the horizon, prevented me from delaying any longer. At half-past two, not daring to telephone, I was already dashing along the Wall of the Angels on my bike, staring at the luxuriant, motionless greenery of Barchetto del Duca coming gradually closer on the left. Everything had gone back to where it was before, as if I had spent the last fortnight asleep.

They were playing down there on the tennis court, Micol against a young man in long white trousers, which it wasn’t hard to make out as Malnate; and very soon I was seen and recognized, since the pair of them stopped playing and waved their rackets strenuously in wide swoops. They were not alone, though, Alberto was there as well. When I came out beyond the greenery, I saw him run into the middle of the court, look towards me and put his hand to his mouth. Then he whistled, two or three times. What was I doing up there on top of the wall?-they seemed to be asking me. Why didn’t I come into the garden, old son of a gun that I was? I was already on my way down towards the opening on Corso Ercole I, already pedalling along by the garden wall, already in sight of the gate, and Alberto still kept sending out his foghorn sounds. “Hey, mind you don’t sneak off!” his still deafening whistles were saying, but they now sounded cheerful rather than admonitory.

“Hi !” I cried, as I always did, when I came into the open from the arcade of climbing roses.

Micol and Malnate had started playing again, and without stopping answered together with another “Hi.” Alberto got up and came towards me.

“Andjust where, might I ask, have you been hiding yourselfall this time?” he asked me. “I rang your home several times but you were never in.”

“He’s been in France,” Micol answered for me from the court.

“In France!” exclaimed Alberto, his eyes full ofsur-prise that looked quite genuine. “Whatever for?” ‘‘I’ve been to see my brother in Grenoble.”

“Oh, of course, that’s true, your brother’s studying in Grenoble. And how is he? How’s he getting on?” We had sat down meantime on two deck-chairs placed side by side by the tennis court gate, in the best position to follow the game. Micol was not wearing shorts as she had done the previous autumn, but a very old-fashioned woollen pleated skirt, a white blouse with the sleeves turned back and peculiar white stockings like a nurse’s. Red-faced and sweating freely, she was doggedly sending shots into the farthest corners of the court; but Malnate, although he had grown fatter and was puffing hard, kept his end up against her pretty well, with tremendous keenness.

A ball rolled towards us and stopped a short distance away. Micol came across to pick it up, and for a moment my eyes met hers. This visibly upset her. Turning to Malnate, she shouted:

“Shall we play a set?”

“Right, let’s,” he replied. “How many games up can I be to start with?”

“Not one,” Micol retorted drily, annoyed. “The most I’ll give you is the chance of first service. Come on now, serve!”

She flung the ball over the net and took up her position to answer his service.

Alberto and I watched them playing for a few minutes. I felt full of disquiet and unhappiness. The way she used the familiar
“tu”
in speaking to Malnate, the deliberate way she had ignored me, suddenly showed me how long I had been away. As for Alberto, he of course had eyes for no one but Giampi. But for once, I noticed, instead of admiring and praising him, he never stopped criticizing him for a moment.

He was the sort-he confided to me in a whisper: and it was so surprising that however wretched I felt I couldn’t help paying attention-he was the sort who’d 
never
make a passable player, even if he was coached every single day by a Nusslein or a Martin Plas. What did he lack to stop him making progress? Let’s see. Legs? No, it couldn’t be his legs, otherwise he wouldn’t be the pretty fair mountaineer he undoubtedly was. Breathing? No, it couldn’t be that either, for the same reason. Muscular strength? He’d got plenty of that and to spare, all you need do to see that was shake hands with him. Well then? The fact was that tennis-he said, giving careful emphatic judgment-was an art as well as a sport, and like all the arts took special talent, a certain “natural class”, in fact, without it you were just no good. You’d be hopeless for the rest of your life.

“What’s all this about?” Malnate called, at one point. “What are you grumbling at over there, the pair of you?

“Get back to the game,” Alberto retorted sarcastically, “and see to it you’re not beaten by a girl!”

I could hardly believe my ears. Was it possible? Where had Alberto’s mildness gone, his submissiveness towards his friend? I looked at him closely. His face looked suddenly peaked, emaciated, prematurely wrinkled with age. Was he ill? I was tempted to ask him, but didn’t dare. Instead I asked if this was the first day they’d played tennis, and why Bruno Lattes, Adriana Trentini, and the rest of the
zozga
* 
“Gang”: Ferrarese dialect.
  weren’t there, like last year.

“So you really don’t know a thing!” he exclaimed, laughing heartily and showing his pale gums.

About a week before-he went on to tell me-realiz-ing that the fine weather had begun, he and Micol decided to ring up about ten people, with the worthy object of starting up last year’s tennis parties again. They telephoned Adriana Trentini, Bruno Lattes, the Sani and Collevatti boys, and various other perfectly splendid specimens of the younger generation he’d never even thought of last year, boys and girls. They all accepted with admirable promptness: so that the opening day, Saturday, May 1st (what a shame I couldn’t have been there) was little less than a triumph. They had not only played tennis, chatted, flirted, and so on, but actually danced, there in the Hiitte, to the music of the Philips “suitably installed”.

The second “session”,* on Sunday afternoon, May 2nd, was an even greater success. But on Monday morning, the 3rd, the trouble started. At about eleven, announced by a sybilline visiting card, who should turn up on a bike but the lawyer Tabet-yes, that’s right, Geremia Tabet, that thundering old fascist, in person-who shut himself up with Papa in the study and handed over definite orders from the Federal Secretary that the scandal of these provocative daily parties that had been taking place there for some time, and apart from everything else weren’t healthy sporting events in the least, must stop at once. It was inconceivable-consul Bolognesi would have Papa know, through their “common” friend Tabet-it was absolutely inconceivable, for obvious reasons, that the Finzi-Continis’ house should gradually be turned into a kind of club competing with the
Elonora d’Este
tennis club, an institution that had done so much for sport in Ferrara. For which reason halt there!: in order to avoid an official prohibition (and for anyone unwilling to do so there was always deportation to the concentration camp at Urbisaglia !), from now on no member of the tennis dub was to be drawn away from his natural surroundings.

“And what did your father reply?” I asked.

“Why, what would you expect him to reply,” laughed Alberto. ‘‘All he could do was behave like Don Abboniot Character in Manzoni’s The 
Betrothed. 
Bow, and murmur: ‘Always ready to obey.’ I think that’s more or less how he expressed himself” hadn’t prevented from following our conversation. “No one’s going to persuade me it wasn’t he who went and complained at viale Cavour. I can just see it happening. Anyway, we must forgive the poor creature: when people are jealous they’re capable of anything. . . .”

She may not have meant the words to have any pointed meaning, but they struck me painfully all the same. I was just going to get up and go. And I might even have managed it, have really got away, ifjust at that moment, as I was turning to Alberto, as if to ask for help and evidence, I hadn’t been pulled up again by the pallor of his face, the sickly haggard shoulders lost in a pullover that was now too big for him (he winked, as if to tell me not to take it to heart, and then was already talking of other things: of the tennis court, and the radical improvements that, in spite of everything, were starting that same week); and if at the same moment, apart from that, I hadn’t seen, at the edge of the clearing, the small black sorrowing figures of professor Ermanno and signora Olga together, taking their afternoon walk in the park and coming slowly in our direction.

The long period that followed, until the fatal last days of August 1939-until the vigil of the Nazis’ invasion of Poland and the phony war-I remember as a kind of slow, progressive descent into the bottomless funnel of the maelstrom. We four-Micol, Alberto, Malnate and I-were the only people to use the tennis court, which was soon re-covered with a good layer of red earth from Imola (we couldn’t count on Bruno Lattes, presumably lost chasing after Adriana Trentini). Variously paired, we spent whole afternoons playing long doubles, with Alberto, though short of breath and tired, always mysteriously ready to start again and to refuse himselfand the rest of us any respite.

Why did I persist in going back every day to a place where I knew perfectly well I would find nothing but humiliation and bitterness? I couldn’t say exactly. Perhaps I hoped for a miracle, for a sudden change in the situation, or perhaps in fact I actually went there in search of humiliation and bitterness. ... We played tennis; and, in the rare intervals Alberto allowed us, stretched on four deck-chairs in a shady row in front of the Hiitte, we argued, Malnate and I especially, on the usual subjects of art and politics. But when I suggested a walk in the park to Micol, who was really very kind to me still, and sometimes even affectionate, she very seldom agreed; and if she did, she never came willingly, but, looking half disgusted and half condescending, very soon made me regret having dragged her away from Alberto and Malnate.

And yet I never stopped trying, I was never resigned to it. Strung between the longing to break it off, to vanish for ever, and the other, opposite, longing never to stop going there, never to give in at any price, I ended up in practice never staying away. Sometimes, admittedly, it was enough for Micol to look at me more coldly than usual, to make an impatient gesture or to look bored or sarcastic a moment, for me to think quite sincerely that I had made up my mind, I had done with her. But how long did I manage to keep away? Three or four days at the most. On the fifth, there I’d be again, looking gay and casual as if I’d just got back from a trip (I always spoke of trips, when I got back; trips to Milan, to Florence, to Rome: and it was just as well that all three of them looked more or less as if they believed me!), but in fact broken-hearted, and trying at once to find an impossible answer in Micol’s eyes. This was when we had our “married rows” -as Micol called them-during which, if I got the chance, I even tried to kiss her: and she put up with it very patiently, and was never ungracious.