The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (5 page)

“jevareheha Adonai veishmereha,”
the rabbi solemnly intoned, bending almost prostrate over the
teva,
after * “Bigotry” in the dialect of Ferrara Jews.

covering his towering white berretta with the
taled.

“Come along, boys,” my father wouldsay then, gaily and quickly, snapping his fingers: “Come along in!”

Escape, in actual fact, was perfectly possible. My father’s hard sportsman’s hands could grab us by the scruff of our necks, and me in particular, very efficiently. Although grandfather Raffaello’s
taled,
which he used, was vast as a tablecloth, it was too worn and too full ofholes to guarantee that his dreams were hermetically sealed. And in fact, through the holes and tears the years had wrought in that immensely frail material that smelt so old and stuffy, it wasn’t hard, at least for me, to watch professor Ermanno as, there beside me, one hand on Alberto’s dark hair and the other on the fine, blonde, fluffy locks of Micol who had dashed down from the women’s enclosure, he repeated, one after the other, and keeping behind Dr. Levi as he did so, the words of the
beracha.
Above our heads my father, who knew about twenty words ofHebrew, the usual ones used in everyday speech, and would never have bowed down, anyway, was silent. I imagined his face looking suddenly embarrassed, his eyes, half sardonic and half intimidated, looking up at the unpretentious plaster-work on the ceiling or at the women’s enclosure. But meantime, from where I was, always newly envious and newly surprised, I watched from below professor Ermanno’s wrinkled, sharp face that looked transfigured at that moment and his eyes that, behind the glasses, I would have said were full of tears. His voice was thin and melodious, perfectly in tune; his Jewish pronunciation, frequently doubling the consonants, and with the z, s and h much more Tuscan than Ferrarese, came filtered, at two removes, by his culture and his class. . . .

I looked at him. Below him, for as long as the blessing lasted, Alberto and Micol never stopped exploring the loopholes of their tent as well. And they smiled and winked at me, both of them oddly inviting: especially Micol.

Once, all the same, inJune of 1929, the day the results of the exams were put up in the school hall, something special happened.

My exam results were far from satisfactory, and I knew it.

Although Meldolesi had done all he could for me, and had even, quite against the rules, managed to question me himself, in spite of this I hadn’t managed to get anything like the marks that usually appeared in my school report. Even in literary subjects I ought to have done very much better. Questioned in Latin on the 
consecutio temporum,
I tripped up over a hypothetical sentence of the third type, that is “of unreality”. And in Greek I had stumbled just as badly on a passage of the
Anabasis.
Well, of course, I caught up later in Italian, history and geography. In Italian, for instance, I did well on
The Betrothed,
and on the
Ricordanze.
* 
Memories,
 a famous poem by Leopardi. And I recited the first three verses of
Orlando Furioso
without a single slip, and Meldolesi, dead keen, let rip with such a loud “Fine!” that it made not only the other examiners smile, but me as well. But on the whole I must admit that even in literary subjects my results weren’ t up to my reputation.

The real disaster, though, was in maths.

Since the previous year, in form IV, algebra had simply refused to get into my head. And besides, I had always behaved pretty meanly with signora Fabiani. I did the small amount of work needed to get the minimum marks, and often not even that minimum, relying on Meldolesi’s unfailing support for my results at the end of term. What could mathematics possibly matter to someone like me who had already declared his intention of reading literature at the university?— kept saying to myself that morning, as I cycled to school along corso Giovecca. Actually I’d hardly opened my mouth in the algebra or the geometry orals. Well, so what? Poor signora Fabiani, who’d never, during the past two years, dared give me less than six out of ten, would never do so at the final session with the other teachers; and I avoided the word “failed”, even mentally, for the very notion of failing in a subject, with the consequent trail of depressing, dreary coaching I’d have to put up with at Riccione for the entire summer, seemed absurd when referred to me. To think of me, me of all people, who’d never once undergone the humiliation of having to take an exam over again, and had, in fact, in the first, second and third form of high school been decorated “for good work and good conduct” with the much-prized title of “Guard of honour to the Monuments of the Fallen and the Garden of Remembrance”, to think of me failing an exam, being reduced to mediocrity, lost among the rabble, in fact! And what about my father? Suppose, just suppose signora Fabiani did fail me (she taught maths higher up in the school as weU: this was why she had questioned me herself-she had a right to !), how would I have the courage, a few hours later, to go home and sit down at table opposite my father, and start eating? Maybe he’d smack me: that would be best, after all. Any punishment would be better than the reproach of his terrible, silent blue eyes.

I went into the school hall. A group ofboys, among whom I noticed several friends right away, was standing calmly in front of the notice-board. I leant my bike against the wall by the front door, and went up to it, trembling. No one seemed to have noticed my coming.

From behind a hedge ofbacks turned obstinately to me I looked. My eyes clouded over. I looked again: and the red five, the only red ink figure in a long black row of them, seared my mind as viciously as a red-hot branding-iron.

“Hey, what’s up?” said Sergio Pavani, giving me a friendly slap on the back. “You’re not going to make a tragedy out of a five in maths now. Look at me,” he said, and laughed. “Latin and Greek.”

“Come on, cheer up,” added Otello Forti. “fve failed in one thing too: English.”

I stared at him, stupefied. We had been in the same form and had sat side by side since we started school, and had always worked together, alternating between our two homes when we did our prep, and both convinced of my superiority. There had never yet been a year when I hadn’t passed in all subjects inJune, whereas he, Otello, always failed in something and had to do it over again in October: English sometimes, or Latin, or maths, or Italian.

And now, suddenly, to hear myself compared with a mere Otello Forti, and the comparison made by him, what’s more! To find I’d suddenly shot down to his level!

What I did and thought in the four or five hours that followed isn’t worth telling in detail, starting from the effect on me of my meeting, as I left school, with Mel-dolesi (he was s^nling, hatless and tieless, with an opennecked striped shirt, Robespierre style, and quick to confirm, as if there was any need to, signora Fabiani’s “pig-headedness” with regard to me, and her categorical refusal to “close an eye once again”) and continuing with a description of my long, desperate, aimless wanderings after Meldolesi had given me a friendly, encouraging tap on the cheek. All I need say is that about two in the afternoon I was still going along the Wall of the Angels, on my bike, in the neighbourhood of corso Ercole I d’Este. I hadn’t even rung them up at home. Face streaky with tears, heart bursting with selfpity, I was pedalling along scarcely realizing where I was, and making confused plans for suicide.

I stopped under a tree: one of those old trees-limes, elms, plane trees, chestnuts-which a dozen years later, in the freezing winter of Stalingrad, were to be sacrificed for firewood, but which in 1929 still raised their great leafy umbrellas high above the city walls.

Completely deserted, all round. The unpaved lane I had cycled along like a sleep-walker from Porta San Giovanni wound on among the tree trunks towards Porta San Benedetto and the railway station. I lay on the grass, face downwards beside the bicycle, my burning face hidden in the crook of my elbow. The warm breeze lapped me round as I lay, wishing for nothing but to stay there, eyes closed, like that. Only a few sounds managed to penetrate the cicadas’ narcotic chorus: the crowing of a cock from a nearby garden, the beating oflinen, some washerwoman working late in the greenish water of the Panfilio canal, and finally, very close, just by my ear, the tick-tock of the bike’s back wheel, growing gradually slower as it neared stillness.

By now-I thought-they’d certainly have heard, at home: from Otello Forti, very likely. Had they sat down at the table? Maybe they had, behaving as if nothing had happened; and then they had had to stop eating, unable to go on. Perhaps they were looking for me. Perhaps they had put Otello himself on the scent, Otello my good, inseparable friend, telling him to search the whole town, including the Montagnone and the Walls, on his bike, so that at any moment I might see him appear before me, looking suitably gloomy, but at the same time simply delighted, as I knew perfectly well, to have failed only in English. No, but: maybe, overwhelmed with grief, my parents hadn’t been satisfied with Otello alone, and had got to the point of sending the police out as well. My father had gone to talk to the chief at police headquarters in the Castle. I could just see him: stammering, tousled, alarmingly aged, a shadow of himself. He was weeping. Ah, but suppose he’d seen me two hours ago gazing into the river at Pontelagoscuro from high above it on the iron bridge (ages, I’d been up there, looking down! How long? Oh, twenty minutes at least, at the very least . . .) that’d really have shaken him . . . that’d really have made him see . . . that’d . . .

“Hey! ”

I woke up with a start, but without opening my eyes right away.

“Hey!” I heard again.

I raised my head slowly, turning it to the left, against the sun. Who was caUing me? It couldn’t be Otello. Then who?

I was about half-way down the three kilometres of city wall that start where corso Ercole I ends, and finish at Porta San Benedetto, opposite the station. It has always been remarkably solitary there. Thirty years ago it was so and it stil is today, in spite of the fact that on the right especially, on the industrial zone side, that is, dozens and dozens of small many-coloured working-class houses have sprouted up in the last few years, with a background of factory chimneys and goods sheds, in comparison with which the dark, wild, bushy, half-ruined buttress of the fifteenth-century rampart seems to grow progressively more absurd.

I gazed about, searching, and half-shut my eyes against the glare. At my feet (it was only then I noticed) the foliage of its noble trees filled with midday light, like that of a tropical forest, Barchetto del Duca was spread before me: enormous, really boundless, with, half-hidden in its green centre, the turrets and pinnacles of the
magna domus,
and entirely surrounded by a wall interrupted only a little way ahead, where the Panfilio canal flowed through.

“Goodness, you’re pretty blind, aren’t you,” a girl’s voice said gaily.

From the blonde hair, that special streaky Nordic-looking blonde ofthefille
aux cheveux de lin,
which was hers alone, I immediately recognized Micol Finzi-Contini. She appeared at the garden wall as if at a window-sill, leaning forward on folded arms; not more than twenty-five yards away. She looked up at me from below: near enough for me to see her eyes;

which were light and large (too large, perhaps, in those days, in her small thin child’s face).

“What are you up to, down there? I’ve been watching you for ten minutes. Sorry if I woke you, though. And . . . bad luck!”

“Bad luck? Why?” I stammered, feeling my face turn red.

I had hauled myself up.

“What’s the time?” I asked, more loudly.

She glanced at her wrist watch.

“I make it three,” she said, with an attractive grimace, and then:

“Bet you’re hungry.”

I was completely at a loss. So they knew too ! For a moment I even thought they must have heard of my disappearance straight from my father or mother: by telephone, of course, like an endless lot of others. But Micol put me right at once.

“I was at the school this morning, with Alberto, to see the results. You must have felt pretty sick about it, didn’t you?”

“What about you, did you get through?”

“We don’t know yet. Maybe they’re waiting to see how all the
other
outsiders have done before they put up the marks. But why don’t you come down? Come nearer, so I shan’t have to shout myself hoarse.”

It was the first time she had spoken to me; in fact, it was the first time, to all intents and purposes, I had ever heard her speak. And from the start I noticed how much her pronunciation resembled Alberto’s. They both talked in the same way: slowly, as a rule, underlining particular and quite unimportant words, the real meaning and weight of which they alone seemed to know, and slurring oddly over others, which you might have thought much more important. This they considered their
real
language: their own special, inimitable, wholly private deformation of Italian. They even gave it a name: Finzi-Continian.