A short while before, as I was walking through one of the drawing-rooms, I had stopped to look at an old, silver-framed photograph which was on top of a small table along with many other family photos. It portrayed me and my mother in 1918, during the last summer of the war. Skinny as a girl, dressed in white, my mother was kneeling beside me against the background of the vegetable garden of my grandparent’s country house at Masi Torello, where she and I had gone to stay shortly after my father had left for the Front. While she hugged me passionately to her breast, she turned in the direction of the lens an intensely joyous smile, in stark contrast to the severe and scowling expression on my chubby face, framed by long, straight hair cut in a fringe. The photo was taken by my father on one of his brief leaves from the Front – it was his masterpiece, he often said, and my mother would nod in agreement every time. Yet only a minute ago, I had understood the real meaning of that smile of my mother’s, a bride of barely three years: what it promised, what it offered, and to whom …
I now watched her. My mother was no longer so young, so much a girl, and I felt my heart once again filling with disgust and rancour. With the rapidity of jump-cuts in a film, epic and melancholic visions of storm-beaten, lonely beaches flashed through my mind, of dizzy, unreachable mountain peaks, of virgin forests and deserts … Oh, to be gone from here, to flee! Not to see another soul, but most of all not to be seen by anyone else!
‘So?’ my mother insisted. ‘Do I have to stay here beneath your balcony, begging, or would His Highness prefer his faithful follower to go all the way upstairs to pay him court?’
No. I’d come down to her. We would talk. I would let her question me, until the moment my father, having returned home and seeing us, would clap his hands to let us know he was there and was in a hurry to have supper. What would it cost me to have lied for half an hour? I would behave perfectly. Every attempt on her part to sound me out would fail.
And if she needed a kiss to deceive herself that I was still a little child, her little child, she would have the kiss she sought.
‘No, wait,’ I replied. ‘I’ll come down straightaway.’
Saying this, I withdrew from the window sill.
15
The ulcer had begun to fester in secret. Slowly, torpidly, irremediably …
I was expecting no epilogue in the near future. I was neither expecting, nor hoping for any explanations whatsoever, not even concerning Luciano. And yet I did see Luciano at Cesenatico, a month and a half later. And with that meeting, I undoubtedly received an explanation of some kind.
One Sunday morning, after a sleepless night spent pacing up and down the few square metres of my little bedroom – I suffered from adolescent acne at that period – I went down to the beach very early and on my own.
It must have been eight o’clock. The vast expanse of sand appeared almost deserted. Stretched out on a deckchair beside a folded beach parasol, I finally dozed off into a fairly light sleep, as I still seemed able to register, one by one, all the small sounds that prefigured the noisy day at the seaside which was just beginning – the coming and going of beach attendants busy setting out tents and parasols, the rhythmic shouts of a group of fishermen drawing their net ashore – but no less restorative for that. And while I was thinking that at around ten I’d rouse myself and go to visit the tent where the children of the Sassòli family from Bologna were camping, and later I would go with them for the usual, very long-drawn-out swim – and then, there he was, before me.
He was standing there studying my awakening, his little skeletal body, utterly hairless, seeming even slenderer beside the abnormal swelling of his sex beneath the grey trunks. He was smiling at me.
‘When did you arrive?’ I asked, without getting up.
A flash of joy and gratitude lit up his eyes. So I wasn’t going to chase him away! So I’d returned to being the nice person I used to be!
‘Only about half an hour ago,’ he replied, with his customary lateral jutting of the jaw.
‘Did you come from Ferrara?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But when did you leave?’
‘When it was still dark!’ he laughed. ‘At quarter to four – just imagine it – there was a local train. Chuff-chuff, chuff-chuff – it took us almost four hours to travel a hundred kilometres.’
The train – he went on, all smiles and contentment – didn’t miss out on a single station en route. It began its stops after only ten minutes: at Gaibanella. Then Montesanto. And then, one after another: Portomaggiore, Argenta, San Biagio, Lavezzola, Voltana, Alfonsine, Glorie, to ‘beach itself’ at Ravenna, two thirds of the way through the journey, where it decided to have a rest for ‘a good thirty-five minutes’. After Ravenna …
I lifted my hand.
‘How did you manage to find our villa?’
‘Every now and then my memory seems to work,’ he replied with a smile, and winked. ‘I remembered the address.’
That captivating wink, rather than hinting at our intimacy during the last months, meant to reassure me that he hadn’t the least intention of reproaching me for anything. Though he did blame me. Affectionately, but still, he blamed me.
‘You must be hungry,’ I said. ‘Should I fetch you something to eat?’
There was no need. My mother – he said, glad to ramble on once more – had already prepared a snack for him. As soon as she’d seen him, she’d kindly taken the trouble to set before him ‘an enormous cup’ of milky coffee. He’d had the coffee in the dining-room, along with my brother and little sister, who had just then got out of bed. But since the two of them wouldn’t be coming to the beach before nine, and since he was keen to see me again, he’d hurried along here.
‘Where did you change?’
‘In your room,’ he replied, slightly alarmed. ‘Why? It was your mother who told me I could go in there …’
At this point he was sitting beside me on the sand. It was a really beautiful morning. Before us the water and the sky formed a single brightness. The boats in the distance seemed to be suspended in air.
‘It’s such a great place, this,’ he murmured after a long silence.
He turned back towards me for a moment, then, in a serious tone, added that he had come to Cesenatico on purpose to see me and have a talk with me. After being so friendly and kind, I had altered of late, and didn’t seem the same person. And since his father had finally managed to persuade a friend of his, an old doctor in Bologna, to rent him his medical practice – a circumstance that would force them to leave Ferrara within a month – before moving elsewhere, he’d felt the ‘pressing need’ to come and thank me once again, hoping at the same time to dispel all those misunderstandings that might have got between us. And so, what did I have to reproach him with? He felt his conscience to be ‘more than clear’. In case I had believed some ‘stupid rumour’ about him that had been put about by ‘malicious persons unknown’ I had only to ask him, and he was ready to answer any question whatsoever.
Seated cross-legged like an Indian, he spoke without looking at me. I listened to him. I listened to the hum his words made in that huge expanse of motionless air. He’d said that he and his family were about to leave Ferrara, that we would never see each other again. Good.
‘Go on,’ he persisted. ‘First question – fire away!’
I replied that there was nothing I had to ask him, not a single thing.
He shook his head.
‘Perhaps,’ he sighed. ‘And yet I feel that you’re hiding something … that you’re not telling the whole truth.’
For a while he stayed silent. At last, after another sidelong glance, he asked me how I spent my days at the seaside and if, during that month or more I’d been here, some seductive married lady hadn’t assumed the responsibility of … of helping me lose my virginity. How many lovely and well-disposed ladies there must be in Cesanatico! Coming from the station to our house, he’d been able to ogle quite a few ‘luscious bits’ taking a stroll along the avenue
s. I … with my physique … all I’d need to do was to take a look around. When on holiday, and especially at the seaside, women only think of enjoying themselves. So whoever … wants to enjoy himself with women … only has to know how to make the best of the opportunities the time and place have offered him.
I had been expecting him, sooner or later, to return to his favourite topic – I’d had that thought from the first moment I spied him through my half-closed eyelids. But the cautious, oddly anxious tone his voice had assumed was something I hadn’t foreseen.
I replied that I hadn’t encountered any married women of that kind, and this time the company I’d been frequenting was all-male, headed by some brothers called Sassòli from Bologna, and anyway, if I had sighted any such women, the spots erupting on my face would undoubtedly have stopped me from being taken into consideration.
He gave a quick look at my face and once again shook his head.
‘What a weird idea!’ he exclaimed happily. ‘You’re strikingly handsome, regardless.’
In any case – he went on – should I fail … ahem … to find anything better ‘out in the streets’ I could always, if I wished, have recourse to him. He immediately explained. A few mornings ago, in Ferrara, while he was passing down Via Colomba, ‘a black-haired beauty’ in her dressing-gown leaning out from a first-floor window in the Pensione Mafarka had greeted him with a big smile accompanied by a suggestive gesture. They hadn’t actually exchanged any words. But he was sure all he needed to do was to introduce himself one morning wearing long trousers – his mother had resisted buying them for him, but within a week he’d be able to persuade her – better still if he was accompanied by a friend … and she, the dark-haired piece, would let us ‘sample the goods’ gratis. If the idea appealed – and he stared me in the eyes – I could be that friend.
‘Couldn’t you invent some excuse to make a trip to Ferrara’ – he relentlessly pursued the topic – ‘that woman, you’ll see, would not only let us in, but take us up to her bedroom together.’
I looked away and up at the sky. As on every morning at that time, a military aircraft was flying over, some way out from the coast. In the distance, the silver cockpit of the Savoia-Marchetti glinted in the sunlight. How many kilometres out was it from the shore? I reckoned that those four fishing vessels far out at sea, motionless on the horizon, must have had the plane overhead.
I stretched and yawned.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘First of all, nor do I have any long trousers. And then the idea of a threesome doesn’t appeal to me. I would never do it.’
‘You don’t like the idea of a threesome?’ he stammered, staring at me, pallid as a drowned man. ‘But I …’
He added nothing more. He started examining the sand in front of his pointed knees.
I too remained silent. Suddenly I stood up.
‘Would you like to take out a rowing boat?’
He lifted his face with an enquiring look.
‘Gladly,’ he replied and was already getting to his feet. ‘But don’t forget I can’t swim.’
‘Never fear. Should the need arise, I’ll save you.’
I rowed. At some hundred metres from the shore, I spotted my mother in a skirt and short-sleeved blouse standing in the doorway of the Adele Baths, having just arrived there from our house. With her right hand, she was holding Fanny’s hand. With her left hand raised, she was screening her eyes from the sun. Not seeing us under the beach umbrella, she must have quickly surmised that we were in the sea and was trying to work out where.
‘Oo-hoo!’ I cried, waving an arm above my head.
‘Oo-hoo!’ she replied. ‘Oo-hoo!’
‘Who is it? Your mother? Luciano asked.
I didn’t reply. I had begun rowing again vigorously, my eyes fixed on my mother, who was already making her way towards our beach cabin. By now she was tiny. In a short while, when she left the cabin wearing her beautiful blue Janzen swimsuit, she would be no more than an indistinguishable speck.
When we had gone about a kilometre from the beach, I stepped up on to the seat and dived in the water. Left alone on the dipping and rolling boat, at first Luciano was overcome by panic. He gripped the seat, looking around bewildered. But he soon seemed to calm down, and I was aware he’d begun to follow my manoeuvres in the water attentively and admiringly.
‘You looked like a motorboat,’ he said as soon as I’d climbed back aboard. ‘What do you call that stroke you were doing?’
‘The crawl.’
‘What is it? Does it come from America?’
‘From Hawaii.’
‘I can believe it!’ he exclaimed enthusiastically. ‘Last week I was at the canal by Via Darsena to watch a swimming race. No one swam like you, making all that foam with your feet. Is it hard to learn, the crawl?’
‘Not that hard.’
I tried to explain to him how you needed to co-ordinate your feet with your head and arms.
‘And who taught you how to do it?’ he asked when I’d finished.
‘No one,’ I replied.
In the meantime I’d started rowing again.
‘And what now?’ Luciano asked in a melancholic tone, realizing that we were once more heading for the open sea. ‘Aren’t we going to turn back?’
‘With the sea this calm it’ll be worth the effort to get as far as the nearest fishing boats.’
I nodded with my chin towards two of the four fishing vessels that I’d noticed from the shore, and that were now fairly close. If we were alongside when they draw in their nets – I said – perhaps they’d give us some fish to make soup with.
‘But apart from the soup,’ I added, ‘can’t you see how beautiful it is?’
And it was, after all, beautiful. I can hardly remember a sea so calm and so flat – rather than floating on the water it seemed that we were flying, gliding slowly through the air. Was that the shore out there opposite? Hazy, with the blue hills behind, I could barely recognize it.
Luciano too had his head turned towards the distant shore. Silent, shut in his thoughts, he seemed to have forgotten about me.
I watched him. And suddenly, there, in the fiery motionless air, I was shaken by a strange cold shiver. I didn’t fully understand. I felt uneasy, suddenly at the edge of things, in some way excluded, and precisely because of that envious, wretched and petty …
And what if, instead, I’d spoken my mind to Luciano? I wondered, staring at his thin, lonely back, a little reddened by the sun above his shoulder blades. If I had been decisive, accepting his recent suggestion, had roughly placed him and myself in front of the truth, the whole truth? Not for an hour yet would the offshore wind begin to make the water choppy. There would be no shortage of time.
And yet in the very moment when, facing his sorry bare back, suddenly distant, unreachable in its solitude, I gave way to these thoughts, already, then, something was telling me that if Luciano Pulga might be able to accept this encounter with the truth, I would not. Slow to understand, nailed by birth to a destiny of exclusion and resentment, it was useless to think I’d ever be able to throw open the door behind which I was yet again hiding. I just couldn’t do it – there was no remedy. Not now. Not ever.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published as Dietro
la porta 1964
This translation published in Penguin Classics 2017
Text copyright © Giorgio Bassani, 1964
Translation copyright © Jamie McKendrick, 2017
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
Cover photograph © Sergio Larrain/Magnum Photos
ISBN: 978-0-141-93887-5
CHAPTER 1
fn1 ‘Death vanquishes the body – Virtue conquers death.’
CHAPTER 8
fn1 ‘Conveyed through many lands and over many seas’, Catullus, 101.
fn2 ‘Sparrow, my darling’s pet’, Catullus, 2.
Behind the Door Page 11
