The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (4 page)

And there, among those
others
(big, clumsy, country louts, for the most part, peasants’ sons prepared for the exams by the village priest, who, before they came inside the school, looked bewilderedly about them, like calves led to the slaughter), were Alberto and Micol Finzi-Contini: not the least bit bewildered, since for years they had been turning up and sailing through, faintly ironical, perhaps, especially towards me, when they saw me across the hall among my friends and greeted me from a distance with a wave and a smile. But always polite, even a bit too polite, and friendly: just like guests.

They never came on foot, still less on bicycles. But in a carriage: a dark blue brougham, with large rubber-tyred wheels and red shafts, and gleaming all over with varnish, glass, and chromium.

It waited there outside the school’s front door, for hours and hours, not moving except to follow the shade. And I must say that examining it close up, in every detail, from the large powerful horse with its docked tail and cropped mane, that occasionally kicked out calmly, to the tiny coat of arms gleaming silver against the blue background of the doors, even occasionally getting permission from the indulgent coachman, who was not in full livery but sat up on the box as if on a throne, to mount up on one of its foot-rests at the side, so that we could gaze comfortably, noses glued to the panes, at the shadowy upholstered grey interior (it looked like a drawing-room: there were even flowers in a corner, in a slim goblet-shaped oblong vase): this could be really something, in fact it certainly was: one of the many adventures and joys those marvellous late spring mornings ofadolescence poured out on us.

As far as I personally was concerned, in any case, my relations with Alberto and Micol had always been rather more intimate. The understanding looks and familiar waves they gave me every time we met at school alluded only to this, as I knew perfectly well, and were something to do with us and us alone.

Rather more intimate. But how, in fact?

Well, of course, in the first place we were Jews, and this would have been more than enough, apart from anything else. Let me make myself clear: we might have had nothing at ah in common, not even the little that comes from having sometimes chatted a bit. But the fact that we were what we were, and that at least twice a year, at the Passover festival and at Yom Kip-pur, we appeared with our respective families all at once at the same street door in via Mazzini-and it often happened that, having gone through the door together, the narrow hall beyond it, half in darkness, obliged the grown-ups to much hat-doffing, handshaking, and polite bowing, although for the rest of the year they had no other occasion for it: as far as we children were concerned, this was quite enough, whenever we met elsewhere, and above all when there were other people about, to make our eyes cloud or laugh with a quite special feeling of complicity and connivance.

The fact that we were Jews, though, inscribed in the registers of the same Jewish community, in our case hardly counted. Because what on earth did the word “Jew” mean? What meaning could terms like “community” or “Israelite universality” have
for us,
since they took no account of the existence of that more basic intimacy-a secret intimacy that can be properly appreciated only by those who have had it- derived from the fact that our two families, not from choice, but through a tradition older than any possible memory, belonged to the same religious rite, or rather to the same “school” ? When we met at the synagogue door, generally as darkness was falling, after our parents had exchanged embarrassed greetings in the shadowyporch, we nearly always ended up mounting the steep steps to the second floor together, where, crammed with all kinds of people, echoing like a church with organ music and singing-and so high up, among the rooftops, that on some May evenings, when the side windows were wide open to the sunset, we would find ourselves steeped in a kind of golden mist-was the large Italian synagogue. Only we, beingJews, of course, but Jews brought up in the very same religious rite, could really understand what it meant to have our own family pew in the Italian synagogue, up there on the second floor, and not in the German synagogue on the first floor, which, with its severe, almost Lutheran gatherings of prosperous Homburg hats, was so very different. Nor was that all: because, even supposing people outside strictly Jewish circles might know that there was an Italian synagogue different from the German one, with all the subtle distinctions this implied, socially and psychologically, who, apart from us, could have been in a position to give precise details about, say, “the via Vittoria lot”? This referred, as a rule, to the members of the four or five families who had the right to use the small separate Levantine synagogue, also called after the city of Fano, on the third floor of an old dwelling-house in via Vittoria: the Da Fanos of via Scienze, in fact, the Cohens of via Gioco del Pal-lone, the Levis of piazza Ariostea, the Levi-Minzis of viale Cavour, and a few other odd families: all rather peculiar people, in any case, faintly ambiguous and inclined to keep themselves to themselves, people whose religion, which in the Italian synagogue had become popular and theatrical in an almost Catholic sense, a fact that was clearly reflected in the character of the people, who were mostly open and optimistic and what you might call very “Po Valley”, had remained essentially a half-secret, exclusive cult best practised at night, by a few people gathered together in the darkest, least known alley-ways ofthe ghetto. No, no: only we, born and brought up
intra muros,
as you might say, could know and really understand these things: which were terribly subtle, of course, and maybe quite beside the point in everyday life, but none the less real for that. As for the others, all the others, not excluding school friends, friends played with as children and loved incomparably more (at least by me), it was hopeless to think ofbringing them into anything so private. Poor souls! As far as this sort of thing was concerned they just weren’t in the running at all, they were all sentenced for life, every one ofthem, to a rough, simple existence at the bottom of chasms, unscalable chasms of ignorance, or-as even my father said, grinning amiably-the life of
“negri goim”.* 
Poor perishing Catholics” in the dialect of Ferrara Jews

So, when we happened to meet, we went up the stairs together, and all went into the synagogue together as well.

And since our seats were next to each other, up there, close to the semicircular enclosures surrounded by a marble banister in the middle of which arose the
teva, 
or lectern, of the rabbi officiating, and both with a good view of the imposing black carved wooden cupboard where the scrolls of the Law, called
sefarim,
were kept, we clattered together across the resonant pink and white lozenges of the synagogue floor. Mothers, wives, aunts and sisters had parted from us males in the entrance hall. They vanished, one behind the other, through a small door in the waU that led into a dark little room, from which a spiral staircase led up to the women’s enclosure, and very soon we would see them peering out through the holes in their hen-coop grating, right up under the ceiling. But even like that, reduced to the males-which meant me, my brother Ernesto, my father, professor Ermanno and Alberto; and sometimes signora Olga’s two bachelor brothers came from Venice for the occasion, the engineer and Dr. Herrera-we were quite numerous. In any case we carried some weight, we mattered: so much so that at whatever moment in the ceremony we appeared in the doorway, we never managed to get to our seats without arousing the liveliest curiosity all round.

As I have said, our seats were close together, one behind the other; we in front, the Finzi-Continis behind. So that even if we had wanted to it would have been very hard to ignore each other.

Attracted by their difference just as much as my father was repelled by it, I was always very careful to notice any movement or whisper from the seat behind us. I was never still for a moment. Either I would be whispering to Alberto, who was two years older than I was, it was true, but still had to “go into the
mignan", 
yet in spite of this hastened, the minute he arrived, to wrap himself up in the great
talcd
of white wool with black stripes that had at one time belonged to his grandfather Moise; or professor Ermanno, smiling kindly at me through his thick spectacles, would with a movement of his finger invite me to look at the copper engravings illustrating an old Bible he had got out of the drawer especially for me; or else I would listen, fascinated and open-mouthed, to signora Olga’s brothers, the railway engineer and the T.B. specialist, chatting together half in Venetian dialect and half in Spanish (“Cossa xe che stas meldando? Su, Giulio, alevantate, ajde! E procura de far star in pie anca il chico . . .”** “What are you reading? Corne on, Giulio, get up! And try and make the child stay on his feet too. . . .”  and then stopping suddenly to join loudly in the rabbi’s Hebrew litany: in fact, one way or another I was nearly always facing backwards. There were the two Finzi-Continis and the two Herreras, in a row in their seats, not much more than a yard away, yet terribly far, quite intangible, as if protected by a wall of glass around them. They were not alike. Tall, thin, bald, with long pale bearded faces, always in blue or black, and, apart from that, putting an intensity, a fanatical ardour into their devotions which their brother-in-law and nephew-all you need do was look at them to see it-would never be capable of, the relations from Venice seemed to belong to a civilization completely foreign to that of Alberto’s tobacco-coloured sweaters and thick, sporty socks, or Professor Ermanno’s scholarly, country gentlemen’s clothes-English wool, yellowish linen. All the same, in spite of their differences, I felt their profound solidarity. What was there in common- all fourofthem seemed to say-between them and the distracted,whispering,
Italian
rank and file, that, even in the synagogue, before the wide open Ark of the Lord, was still taken up with all the trivial cares of everyday life, business, politics, even sport, but never with the soul or with God? I was a child in those days, it was true, between ten and twelve years old, yet I felt a confused but searing scorn and humiliation at my equally confused but basically accurate guess that I belonged there in the rank and file myself, among those vulgar folk to be kept at a distance. And what about my father? Up against the glass wall behind which the Finzi-Continis and the Herreras, always pleasant but remote, continued to all intents and purposes to ignore him, he behaved in a wayjust the opposite from mine. Instead oftrying to approach them, as I did, I saw him in reaction against them; with his medical degree, freethinker, war volunteer, fascist whose membership went back to 1919, sports enthusiast, in fact modern Jew-he exaggerated his own healthy intolerance of any overservile and obvious exhibition of faith.

When the gay procession of the
sefarim
passed by the seats (wrapped in their rich mantles of embroidered silk, silver crowns askew and small bells tinkling, the sacred scrolls of the
Torah
seemed like a series of royal infants shown to the populace to bolster some tottering monarchy), the Herreras were all agog to leap out of their seats and kiss whatever scarlet bits of mantle they could get hold of, with practically indecent greed. True, professor Ermanno, followed by his son, simply covered his eyes with a piece of the
taled,
and softly whispered a prayer, but even so !

“What mawkishness, what
haltud
!”* my father would comment later at the table, disgustedly: not that this prevented him-quite the contrary, in fact-from returning straight afterwards, yet again, to the question of the Finzi-Continis’ hereditary pride, to the absurd isolation they lived in, or even to their persistent, subterranean, aristocratic-type anti-semitism. But while we were there, having no one on which to vent himself, he took it out on me.

As usual, I had turned round to look.

“Will you please shut up and behave yourself?” he whispered through clenched teeth, his angry blue eyes glaring exasperatedly at me. “Even in the synagogue you can’t behave. Look at your brother here: he’s four years younger than you, and could certainly teach you manners !”

But I never listened. Soon afterwards, his orders quite forgotten, I had turned again, my back to Dr. Levi singing the psalms.

Now, if he wanted to have me under his control for a few minutes-his physical control, of course, nothing more-all my father could do was wait for the solemn benediction, when all the sons were gathered under the fathers’
taletod,
as if inside as many tents. And here at last (Carpanetti, the verger, had finished going round with his rod, lighting up the thirty silver and gilt bronze candelabra one after the other: the room was blazing with lights) here, anxiously awaited, Dr. Levi’s voice, as a rule so colourless, would suddenly take on the prophetic tone suited to the supreme, final moment of the
beracha.