The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

by Giorgio Bassani

  To present a novel so sustainingly full of life as something walled-in and sepulchral would be very misleading. The imagery that Bassani has found to capture states of enchantment is most powerfully centred on the Finzi-Continis’ garden, the Barchetto del Duca itself. Unspoilt, Edenic, spacious, with all its botanical profusion, the garden seems to hold out against this sense of constriction. The city itself is a mixture of open vistas and cramped enclosures, but there is nothing forced about the symbolism that suffuses Bassani’s Ferrara, from the dizzy parapets of Montagnone to the curious earthworks that undermine the city walls.

  In the novel we can see how the walls themselves inscribe circles within circles. The smaller walled circle of the garden of the Finzi-Continis meets the outer circle of the city walls at the Mura degli Angeli (the Wall of Angels). It is here, where the circumferences of these two walls almost touch, that the charged childhood meeting between the narrator and Micòl takes place. Instead of entering the garden, he becomes distracted by the underground world of the chamber where he hides his bike. This mound was the former repository for the Renaissance city’s arms, and is now a gloomy echo-chamber which wraps the narrator in a state of childish erotic reverie in which he imagines all kinds of intricate and absurd complications in his future. It is at exactly the same point that he arrives at the end of the novel: uninvited and furtive, he enters by night and then pursues a train of desecrating imaginings that seal his separation from Micòl. (As readers, we never know whether these suspicions on her account have any foundation, another example of the author’s – as opposed to the narrator’s – tact.) But the novel explores a whole series of intersecting and enclosing circles. The Commercial Club, as I’ve translated Il Circolo dei Negozianti, is literally a ‘Circle’ which his father belonged to and is expelled from in the wake of the Racial Laws. Based on the actual ‘Marfisa’ club, from which Bassani (an excellent tennis player and tournament winner) was himself excluded, the Eleonora d’Este Tennis Club is, in the original, another Circolo from which the narrator is expelled along with all other Jewish players. They are then invited to play on the Finzi-Continis’ court, and it is at this point that the narrator, ten years after his failed attempt, finally enters the garden for the first time. But the walls of the city enclose other walls, including the huddle of streets that constituted the old Ghetto. The Jewish community itself comprises not just one but several circles that have some overlap yet remain distinct.

  One source of the present novel’s extraordinary resonance is a series of almost subliminal interior echoes and parallels which testify to Bassani’s poetic imagination at work. The narrator who will finally, in writing this story, give an account of his community has two examples before him, neither of whom adequately fulfils the role he seeks and yet both of whom supply him with the necessary nourishment to undertake the task. First there is his father, a kind of oral historian of the community, who mixes extempore stories from the past with riffs of sparkling and malicious gossip. Then there is Professor Ermanno Finzi-Contini, a kind of elective father, more bowed and solemn and antiquarian, who modestly alludes to his own researches into Italian Jewry, and offers the use of his library to the narrator for his thesis, hoping the latter might take up where he left off. Although the narrator follows neither of these offered paths or precedents, his own procedure somehow includes and honours both.

  As with the parallel play of cemeteries and gardens, we find similar though less conspicuous structurings throughout. Towards the end of the novel, for example, the narrator conducts two crucial bedside conversations. The first is with Micòl, ill with flu, propped up in her bed, half outside the blankets. During this talk, he finally confronts the hopelessness of his desires. The second, some chapters later, is with his now insomniac father, tormented with worry and self-reproach, also sitting up in bed with his chest outside the sheet. For the narrator, this conversation effects an emotional reconciliation with his father (and also, in a way, with himself). These parallel scenes dealing with loss and restoration have an uncanny resonance and an indelible emotional impact.

  As a remarkable account of first love, the novel manages to be both idyllic and psychologically convincing; and at the same time harrowingly aware of separation and loss. It is also a study of a developing consciousness. We intimately observe his time at school and university, and his first literary and artistic enthusiasms both for the past and the present age, notably Ungaretti, Montale, Saba and Morandi. The novel traces the narrator’s aesthetic and political formation – the two aspects, however uncomfortably, are always wedded. And yet, though the ‘I’ of the narrator is continually to the fore, Bassani’s alter ego is anything but triumphant. He can be priggish, petulant and self-abasing, defeated by trivialities and by his own timidity. The narrator, and by implication the artist, is never lifted above his milieu. One of the most remarkable features of this novel is how his own failures are made so apparent. It is finally Micòl, artistically a dilettante and politically all but indifferent, who is seen to have a prescience about life, a precocious knowingness about erotic love – for which tennis, once again, supplies the most memorable image – and an unobstructed view of the past, the present and the future that is denied to the other characters, the narrator included.

  Certo, il cuore, chi gli dà retta, ha sempre qualche cosa da dire su quello che sarà. Ma che sa il cuore? Appena un poco di quello che è già accaduto.

  Of course, for whoever pays heed to it, the heart always has something to say about what’s to come. But what does the heart know? Just the least bit about what has happened already.

  Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi, chapter VIII

  Prologue

  * * *

  For many years I have wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis – about Micòl and Alberto, Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga – and about the many others who lived at, or like me frequented, the house in Corso Ercole I d’Este, Ferrara, just before the last war broke out. But the impulse, the prompt, really to do so only occurred for me a year ago, one April Sunday in 1957.

  It was during one of our usual weekend outings. Ten or so friends piled into a couple of cars, and we set out along the Aurelia soon after lunch without any clear destination. A few kilometres from Santa Marinella, intrigued by the towers of a medieval castle which suddenly appeared on our left, we had turned into a narrow unpaved track, and ended up walking in single file, stretched out along the desolate sandy plain at the foot of the fortress – this last, when considered close up, was far less medieval than it had promised to be from the distance, when from the motorway we had made out its profile against the light and against the blue, blazing desert of the Tyrrhenian sea. Battered by the head-on wind, and deafened by the noise of the withdrawing tide, and without even being able to visit the castle’s interior, as we had come without the written permit granted by some Roman bank or other, we felt deeply discontented and annoyed with ourselves for having wanted to leave Rome on such a day, which now on the seashore proved little less than wintry in its inclemency.

  We walked up and down for some twenty minutes, following the curve of the bay. The only person of the group who seemed at all joyful was a little nine-year-old girl, daughter of the young couple in whose car I’d been driven. Electrified by the wind, the sea, the crazy swirls of sand, Giannina was giving vent to her happy expansive nature. Although her mother had tried to forbid it, she had rid herself of shoes and socks. She rushed into the waves that beat on the shore, and let them splash her legs above the knee. In short, she seemed to be having a great time – so much so that, a bit later, back in the car, I saw a shadow of pure regret pass over her vivid black eyes that shone above her tender, heated little cheeks.

  Having reached the Aurelia again, after a short while we caught sight of the fork in the road that led to the Cerveteri. Since it had been decided we should return immediately to Rome, I had no doubt that we would keep straight on. But instead of doing so, our car slowed down more than was required, a
nd Giannina’s father stuck his hand out of the window, signalling to the second car, about twenty-five metres behind, that he intended to turn left. He had changed his mind.

  So we found ourselves taking the smooth narrow asphalted street which in no time leads to a small huddle of mainly recent houses, and from there winds on further towards the hills of the hinterland up to the famous Etruscan necropolis. No one asked for any explanations, and I too remained silent.

  Beyond the village the street, in gentle ascent, forced the car to slow down. We then passed close by the so-called montarozzi which have been scattered across that whole stretch of Lazian territory north of Rome, but more those parts towards the hills than towards the sea, a stretch which is, therefore, nothing but an immense, almost uninterrupted cemetery. Here the grass is greener, thicker and darker coloured than that of the plain below, between the Aurelia and the Tyrrhenian sea – as proof that the eternal sirocco, which blows from across the sea, arrives up here having shed en route a great part of its salty freight, and that the damp air of the not too far-off mountains begins to exercise its beneficent influence on the vegetation.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Giannina.

  Husband and wife were sitting in the front seat with the child in between them. Her father took his hand off the wheel and let it rest on his daughter’s dark brown curls.

  ‘We’re going to have a look at some tombs which are more than four or five thousand years old,’ he replied, with the tone of someone who is about to tell a fairy tale, and so doesn’t mind exaggerating as far as numbers go. ‘The Etruscan tombs.’

  ‘How sad,’ Giannina sighed, leaning her neck on the back of the seat.

  ‘Why sad? Haven’t they taught you who the Etruscans were at school?’

  ‘In the history book, the Etruscans are at the beginning, next to the Egyptians and the Jews. But, Papa, who d’you think were the oldest, the Etruscans or the Jews?’

  Her father burst out laughing.

  ‘Try asking that gentleman,’ he said, signalling towards me with his thumb.

  Giannina turned round. With her mouth hidden behind the back of the seat, severe and full of diffidence, she cast a quick glance at me. I waited for her to repeat the question. But no word escaped her. She quickly turned round again and stared in front of her.

  Descending the street, always at a slight gradient and flanked by a double row of cypresses, we came upon a group of country folk, lads and lasses. It was the Sunday passeggiata. With linked arms, some of the girls at times made exclusively female chains of five or six. How strange they look, I said to myself. At the moment we passed them, they peered through the windows with their laughing eyes, in which curiosity was mingled with a bizarre pride, a barely concealed disdain. How strange they looked, how beautiful and free.

  ‘Papa,’ Giannina asked once again, ‘why are old tombs less sad than new ones?’

  A yet more numerous brigade than those that had passed us earlier, which took up almost the whole thoroughfare, and sang in chorus without thinking of giving way, had almost brought the car to a halt. Her father put the car into second gear as he thought about this.

  ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘the recent dead are closer to us, and so it makes sense that we care more about them. The Etruscans, they’ve been dead such a long time’ – once again he lapsed into the fairy-tale voice – ‘it’s as though they’d never lived, as though they were always dead.’

  Another pause, this time a longer one. At the end of which – we were already very close to the widened space in front of the necropolis’s entrance packed with cars and mopeds – it was Giannina’s turn to become the teacher.

  ‘But now that you say that,’ she gently put it, ‘it makes me think the opposite, that the Etruscans really did live, and that I care about them just as much as about the others.’

  The whole visit to the necropolis that followed was infused by the extraordinary tenderness of this remark. It had been Giannina who had helped us understand. It was she, the youngest, who in some way led us all by the hand.

  We went down into the most important tomb, the one reserved for the noble Matuta family: a low underground living room which accommodated a score of funeral beds disposed within the same number of niches carved in the tufa walls, and densely adorned with painted murals that portrayed the dear departed, everyday objects from their lives, hoes, rakes, axes, scissors, spades, knives, bows, arrows, even hunting dogs and marsh birds. And in the meantime, having willingly discarded any vestige of historical scruple, I was trying to figure out exactly what the assiduous visits to their suburban cemetery might have meant to the late Etruscans of Cerveteri, the Etruscans of the era after the Roman conquest.

  Just as, still today, in small Italian provincial towns, the cemetery gate is the obligatory terminus of every evening passeggiata, they came from the inhabited vicinity almost always on foot – I imagined – gathered in groups of relatives and blood kindred, or just of friends, perhaps in brigades of youths similar to those we had met head-on in the street before, or else in pairs, lovers, or even alone, to wander among the conical tombs, hulking and solid as the bunkers German soldiers vainly scattered about Europe during the last war, tombs which certainly resembled, from outside as much as from within, the fortress dwellings of the living. Yes, everything was changing – they must have told themselves as they walked along the paved way which crossed the cemetery from one end to the other, the centre of which, over centuries of wear, had been gradually incised by the iron wheel-rims of their vehicles, leaving two deep parallel grooves. The world was not as it once was, when Etruria, with its confederation of free, aristocratic city-states, dominated almost the entire Italic peninsula. New civilizations, cruder and less aristocratic, but also stronger and more warlike, by this stage held the field. But in the end, what did it matter?

  Once across the cemetery’s threshold, where each of them owned a second home, and inside it the already prepared bed-like structure on which, soon enough, they would be laid alongside their forefathers, eternity did not perhaps appear to be such an illusion, a fable, an hieratic promise. The future could overturn the world as it pleased. There, all the same, in the narrow haven devoted to the family dead, in the heart of those tombs where, together with the dead, great care had also been taken to furnish many of the things that made life beautiful and desirable; in that corner of the world, so well defended, adorned, privileged, at least there (and one could still sense their idea, their madness, after twenty-five centuries, among the conical tombs covered with wild grass), there at least nothing could ever change.

  When we left it was dark.

  From Cerveteri to Rome is not that far, normally an hour by car would be enough. That evening, however, the journey was not so short. Halfway, the Aurelia began to be jammed with cars coming from Ladispoli and from Fregene. We had to proceed almost at a walking pace.

  But once again, in the quiet and torpor (even Giannina had fallen asleep), I went over in my memory the years of my early youth, both in Ferrara and in the Jewish cemetery at the end of Via Montebello. I saw once more the large fields scattered with trees, the gravestones and trunks of columns bunched up more densely along the surrounding and dividing walls, and as if again before my eyes, the monumental tomb of the Finzi-Continis. True, it was an ugly tomb – as I’d always heard it described from my earliest childhood – but never less than imposing, and full of significance if for no other reason than the prestige of the family itself.

  And my heartstrings tightened as never before at the thought that in that tomb, established, it seemed, to guarantee the perpetual repose of its first occupant – of him, and his descendants – only one, of all the Finzi-Continis I had known and loved, had actually achieved this repose. Only Alberto had been buried there, the oldest, who died in 1942 of a lymphogranuloma, whilst Micòl, the daughter, born second, and their father Ermanno, and their mother Signora Olga, and Signora Regina, her ancient paralytic mother, were all deported to Germany in the autum
n of 1943, and no one knows whether they have any grave at all.

  I

  * * *

  1

  The tomb was huge, solid and truly imposing, a kind of temple, something of a cross between the antique and the oriental, such as might be encountered in those stage-sets of Aida or Nabucco very much in vogue at our theatres only a few years back. In any other cemetery, including the neighbouring municipal cemetery, a grave of such pretensions would not have provoked the slightest wonder, might even, mixed in among the rest, have gone unheeded. But in ours it stood out alone. And so, although it loomed some way from the entrance gate, at the end of an abandoned field where for more than half a century no one had been buried, it made an eye-catching show of itself.

  It seems that a distinguished professor of architecture – responsible for many other eyesores in the city – had been commissioned to construct it by Moisè Finzi-Contini, Alberto and Micòl’s paternal great-grandfather, who died in 1863, shortly after the annexation of the Papal States’ territories to the Kingdom of Italy, and the resulting final abolition, in Ferrara as well, of the Jewish ghettos. A big landowner, ‘Reformer of Ferrarese Agriculture’ – as could be read on the plaque, eternalizing his merits as ‘an Italian and a Jew’, that the Community had had set above the third landing on the staircase of the Temple in Via Mazzini – but clearly a man of dubious artistic taste: once he’d decided to establish a tomb sibi et suis he’d have let the architect do as he liked. Those were fine and flourishing years – everything seemed to favour hope, liberality and daring. Overwhelmed by the euphoria of civic equality that had been granted, the same that in his youth, at the time of the Cisalpine Republic,1 had made it possible for him to acquire his first thousand hectares of reclaimed land, it was easy to understand how this rigid patriarch had been induced, in such solemn circumstances, to spare no expense. It is likely that the distinguished professor of architecture was given a completely free hand. And with all that marble at his disposal – white Carrara, flesh-pink marble from Verona, black-speckled grey marble, yellow marble, blue marble, pale green marble – the man had, in his turn, obviously lost his head.