Behind the Door

by Giorgio Bassani

  He asked me how I had done in lower secondary school, and if I had ever been held back a year. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking around as though he thought me untrustworthy and was soliciting testimony from whoever was willing to supply it.

  ‘He always does well. One of the best,’ someone dared to venture, perhaps Pavani, there, in the first desk in the front row.

  ‘Ah, so one of the best!’ Guzzo exclaimed. ‘But if he belonged to the chosen few in lower school … how come this falling-off? How did that come to pass?

  I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the desk as if the answer Guzzo sought would come to me from that ancient blackened wood.

  I lifted up my head.

  ‘How come?’ he persisted implacably. ‘And why have you chosen a desk such as that one? Perhaps to be close to the excellent Veronesi and to the no less excellent Danieli, so as to learn true wisdom from them, rather than from me?’

  The class broke out in unanimous laughter. Even Veronesi and Danieli laughed, though less heartily.

  ‘No, no, you should pay heed,’ continued Guzzo, controlling the turmoil with the broad sweeping gesture of a conductor. ‘First of all, you must change places.’

  I looked about, weighed up and narrowed down the options.

  ‘There. In the fourth desk. Next to that gentleman.’

  He pointed at Cattolica.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Cattolica stood up.

  ‘Carlo Cattolica,’ he replied plainly.

  ‘Ah, good … the famous Cattolica, good, good. You come from 5A, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good, good. A with B. Perfect.’

  I gathered up my books, stepped into the aisle, reached my new desk, greeted in passing by a cough from Veronesi and welcomed on arrival by a smile from the ace of the A form.

  ‘So be careful, Cattolica,’ Guzzo said in the meantime. ‘I’m entrusting him to you. Lead this poor lost sheep back to the straight and narrow.’

  2

  I have absolutely no idea what became of Carlo Cattolica in these last thirty years.

  He’s the only one of my school companions about whom I know nothing: what career he took up, if he ever married, where he lives, or if he is still alive. I can only say that in 1933, after he passed the final school exams with the highest marks, he had to leave Ferrara to move to Turin, where his father, an engineer – a little bald chap with blue eyes, maniacally dedicated to opera and stamp-collecting, browbeaten by his maths teacher wife who was a whole head taller than him – had unexpectedly been given secure employment in, I believe, a paint factory. Did Cattolica, the son, become an important surgeon, as he had predicted since the beginning of 1930, confident in himself as ever? Did he actually get married to the girl he went on his bicycle to meet every evening in Bondeno, and to whom he was, then, ‘officially’ engaged – Accolti, Graziella Accolti, I think she was called? Our generation has been buffeted about like few others. The war and all the rest of it obliterated a multitude of our intentions and vocations no less resolute than those of Carlo Cattolica. And yet something tells me he is alive, is a surgeon as he dreamt of being and that, even though he left Ferrara when still a boy, all the same he ended up marrying his Graziella. Will we two ever meet again? Who can say? I realize that’s a possibility. But I should press on regardless.

  I can still see Cattolica’s fine-featured, clear-cut profile to my right, precisely modelled as on a medal. He was tall, very thin, with lively black eyes set under arched, rather prominent eyebrows and a forehead that wasn’t high but broad, pale, placid, very beautiful. It’s odd but the earliest image I have of him is likewise in profile. We both went to the primary school, Alfonso da Varonno in Via Bellaria, even then in different classes, and one morning, in the school courtyard, in the recreation hour, I was struck by his way of running. He sped round the perimeter wall, moving his thin legs with the long, regular, scythe-like strides of the middle-distance runner. I asked Otello Forti who he was. ‘What? Don’t you know who that is? It’s Cattolica!’ Otello had answered, wide-eyed. He ran, I noticed, in a different way to all the others, myself included, as if nothing could distract him or force him to veer off course. He advanced calmly looking ahead, as though he was the only one, he alone among all the others, who was sure of where he was going.

  Now we were sitting close together, only a few inches from each other, but a sort of secret border, a demarcation line, stopped us communicating with the relaxed familiarity of friendship. To begin with, to tell the truth, I had made a few tentative attempts. One morning during Latin class work I had asked him, for example, if I might, due to exceptional circumstances, slip the two fat volumes of my George’s dictionary into the space under our desk reserved for him, for his books and exercise books. And yet the chill rotation of a very few degrees which Cattolica, in consenting, performed on the axis of his face, had quickly dissuaded me from any further requests of this kind. What else was I hoping for anyway? I wondered. Wasn’t the social significance, the worldly uplift of our union enough for me? At primary school, every year from the first to the fifth, he had been the best pupil of the A class, not to speak of lower secondary school, where the teachers passed around his compositions in the corridors. Yet I too, allowing for a slip every now and then, had always been a part of the select top group. And so? Being, as we were, the standard-bearers of two historically rival factions, wasn’t it better that we behave precisely so, each of us remaining, to all intents and purposes, in our proper places?

  As a rule, we displayed ample mutual consideration; the maximum respect and chivalry. Every now and then, after being tested, we’d return to our desk graciously bestowing on each other smiles of approval, congratulatory handshakes; nevertheless, anxious that Mazzanti behind us (who, being aware of the situation and scenting the chance to extract some advantage from it for himself and Malagù, had soon begun his own register in which he accurately totted up the marks each day) hadn’t made any errors, and had maintained that unwavering fairness and impartiality in his faithful record-keeping to which he laid claim. But then, during class work, how precipitously those frail castles of opportunistic hypocrisy crumbled away. In such circumstances, no passage of Greek or Latin was hard enough to master that it could ever induce us to join forces. Each of us would work on our own account, jealously and meanly avid of our own marks, even ready, just so as to owe nothing to the other side, to give in an unfinished or erroneous version. As I had foreseen, Droghetti and Camurri acted as go-betweens for Cattolica and the distant advance posts of Boldini and Grassi. When time was restricted, when our teacher Guzzo, having raised his eyes from the proofs of some essay of his on Suetonius, would announce with a cruel smile that in exactly two minutes, and not a moment more, he would send out the ‘excellent’ Chieregatti to collect the ‘manuscripts of you gentlemen’, you’d have to have seen it to believe with what impudent efficiency the telephone network of the A section was made to work! Goodbye, then, to any exchange of smiles and handshakes; goodbye to any feigned comradely courtesies. The mask fell off. And when it fell, the irreprehensible face of Cattolica, pent up and twisted with factional striving, showed itself to me in all its hostile, hateful reality. Naked, at last.

  And yet, even though I loathed him, I admired and envied him at the same time.

  Perfect in everything, in Italian as in Latin, in Greek as in history and philosophy, in science as in mathematics and physics, art history and even gymnastics – I was let off religious studies and didn’t attend the lessons of Father Fonseca, but I had no doubt that even with ‘the Priest’ Cattolica was impeccable – I hated and at the same time envied his mental clarity, the lucid working of his mind. What an addled klutz I was compared to him! It was true; perhaps in Italian essay-writing I outdid him. But not always, as there was a range of topics, some that suited me, some that didn’t, and when an argument didn’t appeal to me, there was nothing to be done – then it would be a fluke if I ma
naged to get six out of ten. Perhaps I also outshone him in Latin and Greek orals – after that initial skirmish, Guzzo had begun to warm to me and, reading Homer or Herodotus, especially Herodotus, he almost always turned to me to elicit what he called the ‘exact translation’ – but in the written exercises, especially in translating from Italian into Latin, Cattolica was decidedly better, recalling all the most recondite little rules of morphology and syntax, and practically never making a mistake. His memory was such that when tested in history, he could recite scores of dates without a single error, or in natural sciences, reel off the classifications of invertebrates to the enraptured Signora Krauss with the same sureness and nonchalance as though he were reading them from the textbook. God, how did he do it? I wondered. What was he hiding in his head? A calculator? And Mazzanti didn’t hesitate – after such displays of mnemonic bravura he was always prompt to mark down a nine or even a nine-plus in his ledger. And the worst of it was, that it was often me who, turning round, would insist on that ‘plus’ being added.

  But my sense of inferiority didn’t derive as much from a comparison of our respective scholastic efforts as from everything else.

  First, his height. He was tall, slender, already a young man, and dressed in an adult fashion, in long grey vicuña trousers, with non-matching jackets in heavy fabric (in the pocket of which would be a packet of ten Macedonia cigarettes), an organdie cravat around his neck; while I, short and stocky, burdened with the eternal zouave trousers which my mother favoured – beside him, how could I seem anything other than an undistinguished little boy? Then sports. Cattolica didn’t indulge in any of them, he even looked down on football, and not because he couldn’t play (once in the churchyard of the Gesù Church we’d improvised a kick-around and he’d shown what a stylish player he was), but ‘just because’: because sport didn’t interest him he considered it a waste of time. Besides, what course of studies would I pursue at university? I didn’t know: one day I inclined towards medecine, the next towards law, the next again towards the arts, while he had not only chosen medecine, but he had decided between general medicine and surgery, opting for the latter. And finally, there was the girl he made love to, the young lady from Bondeno. In matters of love, I hadn’t had the least, serious, actual experience – would the summertime beach encounters I’d had with those young girls even count as experience? A little holding of hands, staring into one another’s eyes, the odd furtive peck on the cheek, and nothing more … He, on the other hand, was officially engaged with a conspicuous ring on his finger. Oh, that ring! It was a sapphire mounted on white gold, an important, senatorial ring, especially displeasing. And yet, what would I have given to own one myself! Who knows, I thought to myself, perhaps to become a man, or at least to acquire that basic minimum of self-confidence to pass oneself off as such, a ring of that sort would surely be an accessory, a great help!

  Who did he, Cattolica, do his homework with in the afternoons? At first, I couldn’t work this out. He seemed so self-sufficient, so aloof, that I was inclined to concede him no real, no close friend. I thought that even his relationship with Boldini and Grassi was based on necessity, and that at his home in Via Cittadella no school friend would ever be invited, not even them.

  But I was wrong.

  To tell the truth, I’d had an inkling some time before: that morning when, as the last one out, I’d gone down the stairs from the chemistry and biology lab, Krauss’s exclusive domain, and then had suddenly seen in front of me that very trio – Cattolica, Boldini and Grassi – halted on a landing in deep conversation. Seeing them there, I immediately guessed that they were arranging to meet up again in one of their houses in the afternoon. In fact, they quickly changed the subject, aware of my approach. They began talking about football – just imagine it! As if I didn’t know Cattolica had no interest in sport, and would never discuss it.

  All the same, I wanted to be sure, I wanted physical evidence. So, that very evening, not having found my father at the Merchants’ Club – from the time I’d stopped studying with Otello I’d taken to stopping in at the club almost every evening at about seven – I suddenly made up my mind. Instead of going straight home, I’d rushed off to station myself at the corner of Viale Cavour and Via Cittadella.

  It was still some twenty minutes before eight. From the Castle to the Customs Barrier, Viale Cavour sparkled with lights, while Via Cittadella, broad and stony, seemed steeped in a dark mist. I stood at the corner and stared towards the Cattolicas’ house, which was a couple of hundred metres away. It was a smallish, red, detached building, recently constructed – undoubtedly graceful, I thought, but with something tasteless about it. Weren’t they a bit vulgar, a touch dubious, the pink curtains that adorned the lit-up second-floor windows? Some of those little houses in Via Colomba where Danieli and Veronesi spent a good part of their afternoons behind closed shutters gave a hint of something similar.

  I waited a quarter of an hour. And I was considering leaving – having begun to suspect that they’d arranged to meet elsewhere, either at Grassi’s in Piazza Ariostea or at Boldini’s in Via Ripagrande – when the street door opened and, one after the other, the three of them, Cattolica included, trooped out.

  All three of them then went back up Viale Cavour on their bikes, slowly enough to allow me to step back from the corner unseen. Once there, however, the trio parted company, Boldini and Grassi turning left, straight towards the city centre, and Cattolica to the right, towards the Customs Barrier.

  Where was Cattolica off to?

  For a good while I tracked him at a distance, my eyes glued to the back light of his shiny, grey Maino bike. It was clear – he was going round to his fiancée’s at Bondeno. But the idea that, after a busy day of studying – the morning at school basking in universal approval, then the afternoon at home soothed by the admiration and affection of his closest friends – he could then award himself an evening session smooching with his fiancée was suddenly unbearable to me.

  3

  Although Otello Forti had received an excellent report at the end of his first term, he wanted to spend no more than three days with his family: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. I hardly saw him – not until a few hours before his return to Padua, and by then he was already utterly taken up with the thought of leaving.

  I had gone to see him at his house, number 24, Via Montebello.

  He had immediately taken me to admire the big dazzling crib, arranged as ever in the ground-floor drawing-room, but as to its construction, that year, for the first time in at least ten years, none of his brothers had thought to invite me round to help. Then we went up to his bedroom. And yet, not even up there, on the top floor, in that little room which I’d always considered somewhat my own, did I manage to make myself useful. As soon as I’d entered, Otello, with unfamiliar courtesy, had made me sit down in the armchair next to the window. Then he busied himself with packing his suitcase. And when I stood up to help him he insisted I sit down again. He preferred to do it himself, he said, he’d get it all done much more quickly on his own.

  I did as I was told. In the meantime, I watched him. Without raising his eyes, he kept going back and forth to his suitcase with a slowness that seemed to me studied. I remembered him as blonder, chubbier, with a pinker complexion – and perhaps, aside from the long trousers that made him look slimmer, he had indeed lost some weight and grown an inch or two. But above all in his eyes, behind the glasses he wore for short-sightedness, there had now settled a serious, solemn, bitter expression which pained and wounded me. It’s true that he’d never been of an open disposition. It had always been me who took the initiative in everything, in our games, our bike rides into the country, our out-of-school reading (Salgari, Verne, Dumas); he, for his part, letting himself be dragged along, grumbling and resistant, but sometimes even laughing, thank heavens, and secretly admiring me precisely because I managed to make him laugh every now and then. But now? What had changed between us? How was it my fault that he’d bee
n failed? Why didn’t he chuck that grudgeful scowl?

  ‘What’s up with you?’ I’d tried to ask him.

  ‘With me? Nothing. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It really looks as if you’ve got something against me.’

  ‘Lucky you, you’re still the same,’ Otello had replied, with a brief, notional smile that strayed no further than his lips.

  He was evidently alluding to my inveterate tendency to worry over trifles, my eternal need to have others like me, as well as to the change brought about in his character by misfortune. If that’s what I wanted to do, I could keep on wasting time with my usual childish whims. But not he, he neither had the time nor the inclination. Misfortune had made a man of him, and a man had to deal with serious things.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘But, I’m sorry, is this any way to behave? If you’d at least have written …’

  ‘It seems to me that I did write. Didn’t you receive my letters?’

  ‘I did, yes, but …’

  ‘Well, then?’

  He raised his eyes and gave me a hard, hostile stare.

  ‘How many times did you write to me? Three letters in the first fortnight. And then nothing after.’

  ‘And you?’

  He was right, the first who’d failed to reply was me. But how could I explain to him, at this point, the reasons why I hadn’t felt like dragging on a correspondence in which our roles had suddenly been reversed? I had thought it was for me to console him for his ill fortune, and yet in some way it had been he, from the start, who’d had to console and chide me.

  Later, making the most of the day’s mild weather – there was no comparison with the brutal winter of the year before; regardless that the season was well advanced, the cold spell had still not dug in – we had gone down to walk in the garden. In the blue, slightly misty light of dusk we had completed a kind of tour of the treasured sites of our friendship: of the lovely central lawn, now damp and patchy, where he and I, along with his brothers and cousins, had played many a game of croquet; of the rustic shed beyond the lawn, the ground floor of which served for a woodpile and coal cellar, and its first floor for a dovecote; and finally of the wooded rise, down there by the outer wall, on top of which Giuseppe, his older brother, had built a greyish hut, half worm-eaten beams and half wire fencing, once a chicken coop, for his rabbit-breeding project. It was mainly Otello who spoke. He gave a sketchy account of his life at school: tough, certainly – he admitted – mainly due to the brutal morning call by the ‘prefects’ (they had to get up at a quarter past five, and then all of them rushed down to the chapel), but ‘cleverly planned’ so they couldn’t sit around dawdling, and always had something to do. The curriculum? Much broader than ours of the year before. For Latin, they had to prepare the third book of the Aeniad, Cicero’s Letters and Sallust’s Jugurthine War. For Greek, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Lucian’s Dialogues and a selection of Plutarch’s Lives. For Italian I promessi sposi and Orlando furioso.