Behind the Door

by Giorgio Bassani

  To operate or not to operate?

  Often in agreement as far as the diagnosis was concerned, my father and my uncle always quarrelled about the treatment. And so, to resolve the eternal dispute at my bedside between the two doctors of the family (my father favoured intervening, my uncle not), my mother thought it best to telephone the throat specialist, Dr Fadigati. It had been Fadigati who had operated on my tonsils when I was a baby. To placate my uncle, they had only been partly removed. No one, then, was better placed than he to decide on the best treatment …

  Fadigati arrived, examined my throat, confirmed the diagnosis. As for the treatment, he too, like my uncle, held the view that, for now, with this temperature I had, a ‘little incision’ might be dangerous. We needed to wait. Around the seventh or eighth day, we’d have a better idea whether to make the most of the occasion – here, the doctor, who was already smiling at me, stretched out his hand and stroked my cheek – finally to be rid of ‘the whole works’.

  There was no need for that. The fever broke on its own. It was true that the two tonsil stumps might cause trouble if they were left there, but once again the decision was made to take no further action. They might, however, discuss the issue further in June, before we left for the seaside.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. And yet I wasn’t happy, or, rather, I was made uneasy by the anticipated recovery which would hasten my return to school. I thought nervously about Luciano. He’d only visited me once. He’d turned up on the second or third day, when I still had a very high fever. Seated composedly by my bedside, even during the brief times when my mother left the room, he spoke of nothing but school matters: which verse they’d got up to translating the Iliad, which of Horace’s Odes Guzzi had set us, what Krauss was currently teaching, and so on. I kept quiet and listened. At a certain point, speaking with some difficulty, I had asked him if, by chance, given that I was ill, he hadn’t thought of doing his homework round at someone else’s house? To which he’d replied, smiling affectionately, no, it hadn’t crossed his mind ‘to two-time’ me. What did I take him for? A Judas? Rather than worry about that, I should make every effort to recover. As soon as I got better – as far as the schedule went I shouldn’t worry: clever as I was, I’d catch up in a jiffy – we too would resume our ‘expert tandem team’. And it was precisely this last prospect which, in the following days, filled me with an obscure reluctance. School and Luciano. Returning to the first meant continuing with the second also.

  Continuing with Luciano. But what would that really mean?

  In bed, convalescent, I abandoned myself to strange thoughts without restraint. Again and again, I paced through the dark tunnel of the last months, from that morning on which Luciano had first appeared at the door of the classroom until, conversation by conversation, we had begun to ‘grasp the nettle’, as he called it. I knew well enough how it had come about. It had all hung on my question about the central heating. The rest, including the mutual display of our penises, had quickly followed on its own from that. I saw the whole scene again. After he had got me to undress, Luciano had leant forward to examine me, while adopting an impassive expression, but at the same time seeming a bit disappointed. Was it possible, he seemed to be thinking, that I who was so much more stocky, robust and sporty than him, was so small in that department? And when he in turn had unbuttoned himself – I could never have guessed that a skinny guy like him would be hiding such a disproportionate thing in his trousers – swollen, white, but above all huge – seeing it, I had felt an uncontrollable sense of disgust grip me in the stomach. Disgust, revulsion. If I continued seeing Luciano, every minute spent with him would be steeped in that revulsion. Latin and Greek would be a walk in the park compared to that!

  And if I were to ditch him? If, offering some excuse, I were to get him off my back?

  At home, that manoeuvre might perhaps have worked without hindrance. I would only need to tell some fib, letting Luciano be the one who made the first move that led to the break-up, or to invent some quarrel. My mother would almost certainly be consoled by the crucial fact that I kept on doing my homework at home. But at school it wouldn’t have been anything like as easy. Even though I had always been a bit ashamed in front of the others of my friendship with Luciano – up there in Krauss’s class, unfortunately, we sat next to each other, but when Mazzanti, before giving him a mark, felt obliged to consult me, most often I didn’t reply, annoyed and shrugging my shoulders – all the same, everyone knew that he came round to mine to study every afternoon. Then there was Cattolica. There was also Giorgio Selmi. Cattolica had always pretended not to notice my partnering up with that ‘arse-licker Pulga’ – as Luciano was referred to within the exclusive circles of the ex-A section. He had never given me the satisfaction of mentioning it, so that if I were now to break with Luciano his triumph would be too prodigious, too overwhelming, too hard to bear. As for Giorgio Selmi, who recently in gym – Luciano was exempted because of a weakness due to pleurisy in childhood – had had the hypocrisy to come up and complain to me about being on his own and had proposed I share a desk with him next year; he too needed to be kept at a distance. To break with Luciano now, all of a sudden, would be to give him too swift a victory, to drop my trousers in front of him as well.

  I went back to school, and immediately after, Luciano began coming round to my house once again.

  I had been off school for rather too long and therefore had to make up the lost time, so that it was easy to keep him in line for the first few days: I imposed my authority – ‘Let’s cut the chatter’. Yet I knew that soon enough we would once again broach those old topics, oh how well I knew it! There was the vaguely sardonic expression in the depths of Luciano’s eyes as confirmation of this; and, even more, there were some imperceptible changes in his behaviour – for instance, the way he was much less adulatory towards me, the way he allowed himself periods of distraction which would have been inconceivable earlier on, his humming in a low voice, waiting, while I beavered away at a sentence not perhaps as tricky as I was pretending it was. ‘Right, go ahead then, if it really means so much to you,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘But does it really? Don’t think I can’t guess what you too would really prefer to concentrate on.’

  All the same, one afternoon something new happened.

  I had gone to a lesson at the gym some way off in Via Praìsolo, after which I’d agreed with Luciano that we would meet up at my house around six. At the end of the lesson, one of our classmates, leaving the gym, had brought out a rubber football, and then a game immediately kicked off in the huge courtyard in front. Rather than a game, it was a tangled series of scuffles without head or tail, but still. The absolute prohibition – that I should not sweat – the same one that a little earlier, during the gym lesson, had forced me to sit it out on a little bench, returned, to fill me with a searing, aching envy. With my back propped against the surrounding wall which separated the courtyard from Via Praìsolo, I kept watching the others running around, jumping, shouting, sweating, and, more than ever, I felt like a social reject, a weakling, a wretch, in every way deserving to end up with Luciano Pulga as my only companion.

  I wasn’t alone, though.

  Cattolica was there too. Instead of sauntering off home as was his wont, he’d stopped to watch. He too was leaning against the wall, and had lit a cigarette without saying a word. But suddenly he approached me, and most unexpectedly, slipped his arm under mine.

  ‘It annoys you not being able to play, doesn’t it?’ he said with sympathy.

  I replied truthfully that I really wanted to, but that unfortunately I couldn’t. For some time, I’d been ill – I added unnecessarily – and my father, who was a doctor, had wanted me not to get hot and sweaty on any account.

  Cattolica stood listening to me patiently and attentively. A fair bit taller than me, he listened with his head tilted a little forwards – a characteristic posture for him when something or someone interested him.

  ‘Perhaps it’s an indisc
reet question,’ he finally said, ‘but what was the illness you had? I haven’t been following the daily bulletins of Pulga,’ he added ironically. ‘I thought he mentioned a sore throat.’

  Daily bulletins? And Luciano hadn’t shown his face more than that once, nor, strangely, had he even telephoned to find out how I was!

  ‘I had an abscess,’ I replied.

  He furrowed his brow.

  ‘Is it painful?’

  ‘Fairly.’ I smiled, staring at him. ‘I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies.’

  He blinked.

  ‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said. ‘If I’d known, I too would have come round to see you.’

  Despite that ‘too’, my heart began beating fast. Cattolica round at my house! The poignant image of him, the repentant and sympathetic rival, beside my sickbed, formed in my mind. But I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t trust him.

  ‘It hurt like hell,’ I said, ‘especially the first few days. It looked as though they’d have to cut it out. Then luckily the abscess burst on its own … It’s likely they’ll have to operate on my tonsils. Not now, but in June, before we go to the seaside.’

  We kept up the conversation like this, standing next to each other, for a good ten more minutes. Although Cattolica had meanwhile unlinked his arm from mine, all the same I felt his presence, his closeness. What did he want, I asked myself? And it made me doubly uneasy: both on account of what he might want and of the obligation that it put on me, to cut a good figure, to act with dignity.

  ‘You live round here, don’t you?’ he asked at a certain point.

  Yes. In Via Scandiana. Close by the Palazzo Schifanoia. Have you ever seen the Schifanoia frescoes?’

  ‘No. Two or three weeks ago, I went as far as Santa Maria in Vado. We live near the station. In Via Cittadella.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It’s a very nice area,’ Cattolica went on with the indomitable confidence he usually showed when speaking about anything concerning himself. ‘Brand-new … modern …’

  He interrupted himself. ‘Listen – why not come round to mine today to do your homework?’

  I turned to look him in the face.

  ‘To your house!’

  ‘Why not?’

  He was smiling, chuffed at having made me gawp.

  ‘Call in at your house, collect your books and then come round. 16, Via Cittadella. How long would it take on your bike? Ten minutes, more or less.’

  ‘Thanks a lot … But, sorry, don’t you do your homework with Boldini and Grassi?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied with the air of a gambler who, seeing he’s been beaten, shows his cards. ‘But what does that matter?’

  ‘Oh, not at all … Only that if there’s already three of you, a fourth would be a crowd.’

  He straightened his back and looked away.

  He then replied that, on the contrary, one more wouldn’t make any difference; it would be far from crowded. In his room, there was a huge table, so big – he smiled with pride – that should you want to, you could seat the whole class around it – ‘the girls as well’. And then – he went on – apart from the fact that Boldini and Grassi, he could assure me, would have nothing against me joining them, nothing against me, they three had studied together for years and that now …

  He turned to look at me.

  ‘You understand,’ he said in conclusion.

  I had understood only too well. Between Boldini and Grassi on one side and me on the other, he would have to choose them, his old companions, his faithful courtiers and yes-men. Besides, it was similarly obvious and undeniable that between his house and mine, it was his house, his room, his table that I, too, needs must prefer. My house, whatever it might contain, was a place in the city that he, from Via Cittadella, wouldn’t dream of considering as something definite, something that actually existed, with a roof, under which I and my family happened to live. And that ‘arse-licker Pulga’ who came round every day to my house? He, too, didn’t exist; Luciano too was an abstract being, who could be ignored, a futile, irksome topic on which it wasn’t worth squandering a single word.

  ‘Yes, I understand, and thanks,’ I replied. ‘But, look, today it’s not feasible. Pulga’s coming round to my house, and there’s no way of rearranging … If only I could phone him …’

  ‘Doesn’t he have a telephone?’

  ‘Not yet. He lives a long way off in the Foro Boario area, beyond the Docks, and to get him on the phone’s a nightmare. You have to call a chemist near his house. But better not, there’s a good chance the man will get annoyed. And anyway, it’s late. As he doesn’t have a bike, it’s likely he’ll be on his way already.’

  Without saying more, we made our way towards the exit. At the door, we paused, still undecided. I had to go to the left, and he to the right.

  ‘Well, bye, then,’ he said coldly, extending his hand.

  ‘Aren’t you waiting for Boldini and Grassi?’

  ‘No. Those two are on their bikes. I’m taking the tram.’

  ‘Unless …’ I resumed the topic, without letting go of his hand, ‘… unless I could bring him along too. I could go home first, ask him, then we could come together.’

  That would solve the problem – I thought, looking searchingly into his eyes with ill-concealed anxiety. All things considered, that would solve the problem splendidly. For me, as well.

  ‘Can I bring him along with me?’

  ‘Him who?’ Cattolica said with a scornful grimace, withdrawing his hand. ‘Pulga?’

  ‘Didn’t you just say that your table was so big? So, if there would be four of us, then …’

  He reacted confusedly.

  ‘No way. Five of us! And Pulga to boot! You must be joking?’

  ‘Joking why?’ I replied very coolly. ‘What’s so wrong with Pulga that you lot have to treat him like he has the plague?’

  I was deeply offended and wanted him to know it.

  ‘He’s been coming round to mine every day since January, and I can’t see any sign I’ve caught it from him.’

  But Cattolica was right – I couldn’t help thinking, even while I was still speaking. Luciano really did have the plague, and by having been so close to him, he’d infected me with it too.

  Cattolica sighed.

  ‘De gustibus. You are free as can be to invite anyone you want to your house. I repeat: if you want to come round to mine, fine, but him, no. Never. Not a chance!’

  ‘Well … if that’s how it is,’ I murmured in a trembling voice, near to tears as I was, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s either both of us or neither.’

  8

  That evening Cattolica and I parted brusquely, or rather it was him who uttered a terse ‘goodbye’, turned his back, and hurried off towards Corso della Giovecca. But, the morning after, he returned determinedly and insistently to the fray. Without once alluding to the strange conversation we’d had, he did his utmost, I couldn’t help noticing, to remove the invisible barrier that had separated us till then.

  It wasn’t as if he ever turned round during lessons. His gaze, as ever, fixed immovably on the teacher seated in front of the class, he continued to show me his finely carved profile, covering his mouth with his hand opened like a fan, whispering under the shadow of his fingers. He was too zealous and disciplined, too attached to his reputation as a model pupil – in regard to behaviour as well – to dispense with these basic precautions. And yet I realized that the perfect straightness of his neck and body, which I effortfully tried to imitate, was dedicated not as much to the eyes in front of him as to the more dangerous eyes, because they lay outside his control, of whoever was behind him. If Luciano, back there from his desk by the wall, had realized that there was no longer the former coldness between me and Cattolica, and that we even spoke to each other, continuously, he would perhaps have been able to guess the topic of our whispering. It was absurd from my perspective. I certainly felt guilty enough towards Luciano to sense, almost physically, the icy touch of his b
lue, interrogating irises on the back of my neck.

  Imagine my astonishment the morning that Guzzo himself turned in surprise towards Cattolica.

  He was scanning aloud a Catullus poem, the one that begins: ‘Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus …’fn1

  He stopped suddenly, and in a muted tone gave the order:

  ‘Cattolica, continue.’

  ‘Me?’ asked Cattolica, astonished, touching his chest.

  ‘Indeed. None other,’ confirmed Guzzo, whom anger generally induced to slip into Tuscan dialect. ‘Carry on scanning the line, my dear chap. Let’s see how you manage.’

  Cattolica began, breathlessly, to flick through the book, which was open, but not at the right page. Who knows how long his torment would have lasted – motionless at the far side of the desk I didn’t dare help him – if, at last, from behind, Malagù’s raised hand hadn’t come to his aid. ‘Well done, Malagù,’ Guzzo remarked. ‘I’m delighted that you are following, that the good Catullus is of interest even to you … But you, Cattolica, tell me: does he not interest you, is he not to your taste, perhaps?’

  ‘No … it’s not …’ stammered Cattolica, very pale in the face, slowly getting to his feet.

  ‘No?’ Guzzo responded, with a grin.

  He arched his thick eyebrows which stood at the base of his vast, Wagnerian forehead like two grey circumflexes – being an atheist, a ‘pagan’, as he had boasted on innumerable occasions, he never lost the chance to make fun of those whom, like Camurri, or indeed Cattolica, he suspected of belonging to clerical families.

  ‘Passer deliciae meae puellae,’fn2 he declaimed softly, while winking at the rest of the class. ‘Is it that little joking gallantry you reproach him for? You won’t forgive him for that?’

  ‘I like him a lot,’ Cattolica heatedly denied the accusation. ‘It’s only that …’

  ‘Only that you,’ Guzzo cut him short, ‘for a good while, taking advantage, with some hypocrisy, of my good opinion, have taken to paying scant attention. Scantinamus, unceasingly. I see you, don’t think I don’t, you and your good neighbour tirelessly gabbing away sub tegmine manuum. What’s wrong with the two of you? Do you think – mistakenly – that you’ve already well and truly passed? Or is it the spring that’s affecting you?’