The Heron

by Giorgio Bassani

  Giorgio Bassani

  * * *

  THE HERON

  Translated by Jamie McKendrick

  Contents

  Part I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part III Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part IV Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  THE HERON

  Giorgio Bassani was born in 1916 in Bologna and spent his formative years in Ferrara. From 1938 onwards he became involved in various anti-Fascist activities for which he was imprisoned in 1943. His works include: Within the Walls (Five Stories of Ferrara), which won the Strega Prize and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which was awarded the Viareggio Prize and was made into a feature film. Bassani later collected these works along with four others, including The Heron, into a single volume entitled The Novel of Ferrara. He died in Rome in 2000.

  Jamie McKendrick is an award-winning poet and translator. He has translated all six books of The Novel of Ferrara anew for Penguin Modern Classics.

  I

  * * *

  1

  Not instantly, but resurfacing with something of a struggle from the bottomless pit of unconsciousness, Edgardo Limentani thrust out his arm in the direction of the bedside table. The small travelling alarm clock which Nives, his wife, had given him three years ago in Basilea on the occasion of his forty-second birthday, kept emitting, at brief intervals, in the darkness, its sharp, insistent though quite discreet alarm. He needed to silence it. Limentani withdrew his arm, opened his eyes, and turned, leaning on his elbow and stretching out his other arm. And at the very moment that his fingertip reached the Jaeger’s delicate, already slightly worn buckskin leather and pressed down the button to stop the alarm, he read the time from the hands on the phosphorescent dial. It was four o’clock: exactly when, the evening before, he had decided to wake up. If he wanted to arrive in Volano in good time he shouldn’t waste a single minute. What with one thing and another – getting up, going to the lavatory, washing, shaving, dressing, knocking back some coffee and so on, it seemed unlikely he’d be in his car before five.

  As soon as he had turned on the light and, seated on the bed, had looked slowly around, he became prey to a sudden sense of listlessness and was tempted to give up, to stay at home.

  Perhaps it was because of the coldness of the room, or the faintness of the glow diffused from the central light – but what was certain was that the bedroom, where except for a brief stretch just after his marriage and except, of course, for the later year and a half in Switzerland, he’d slept since his boyhood, had never seemed to him so alien and so squalid. The dark wardrobe, tall, wide and bulbous – his mother had always referred to it as ‘paunchy’ – which occupied a good part of the left-side wall; the heavy chest-of-drawers on the right-side wall, topped by a small oval mirror, so opaque it was good for nothing, not even for knotting a tie; directly in front of him the mahogany glass showcase for rifles, dwarfed by the grey form of the pelmet; the armchairs; the wheeled clothes-horse on which yesterday afternoon, a good half day early, his mother had set out his woollen suit, with the proper vest and long johns – the other articles that comprised the whole hunting outfit, including his boots, which she had preferred to leave ready for him in the bathroom; several mounted pictures (that of his degree certificate and those of his own photographs, chiefly of mountains) here and there hung randomly on the walls: each piece of furniture, each of his household goods, each object which fell beneath his gaze discomfited and vexed him. It was as if he were seeing them all for the first time. Or else, more accurately, as if only now was he able to perceive their petty, absurd and irksome aspect.

  He yawned. He passed his hand over his cheek and chin, rough with stubble, pushed back the covers, set his feet down on to the floor, took from a chair his fawn-coloured towelling dressing-gown, put it on over his pyjamas, shuffled on his slippers; and after a few moments stood before the window and looked out over the courtyard through the glass and the half-closed shutters.

  There was hardly anything to be seen. The courtyard was so steeped in darkness that he could barely make out the well at its centre. And yet from the kitchen window of the Manzolis’, the caretakers, streamed a bar of the whitest light: intense enough to reach the top of the high surrounding wall which faced towards Via Montebello, to the highest branches of the tall climbing rosebush which, in summer, almost completely covered the inner side of the wall. Gusts of the sirocco shook and ruffled it. The gusts were dry and light and sudden, as though impelled by an electrical discharge. It wasn’t raining. As long as the wind blew, it wouldn’t rain.

  He turned to look towards the entrance. The door of the ground-floor apartment the Manzoli family occupied was open. From it another light shone out, though far weaker than that from the kitchen window, and suddenly a bent and burdened figure was seen in profile against it.

  ‘Romeo’s already up and about,’ he muttered to himself.

  Attentive and motionless, he followed the caretaker’s every move. He saw him go up to the wrought-iron gate which divided the entrance from the courtyard, half-open one of the wings of the gate, step out into the street, look up at the dark sky, and finally, evidently having become aware of him, the owner, he doffed his beret.

  He opened the double casement window, and was caught by a gust of soft, damp, almost warm wind as he swung the blinds wide and leant out to fix them to the wall.

  He straightened up.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, addressing the caretaker. ‘Would you please tell Imelda, if she’s already up, to make me a coffee?’

  ‘Will you be going anyway, sgnór avucàt?’fn1 asked the other in dialect, he too in a soft, lowered tone.

  He nodded in the affirmative, and then closed the windows. Moving away from the windowsill, he was in time to notice Romeo once again doffing his beret. How many long years had the Manzolis been in service at their house? he wondered as he entered the bathroom, slightly distracted just as he passed the gun cabinet by the subdued gleam of the rifle barrels behind the glass. They must have been with them, he concluded, for maybe a little more or a little less than forty years.

  He took off his dressing-gown, hung it on the hook fixed to the door, let the water in the basin run till it was hot, and took his shaving kit from the leather washbag, all the while observing himself in the mirror.

  That face was his own, and yet, all the same, he stood there observing it as if it belonged to someone else, as if not even his own face belonged to him. He checked every detail meticulously and diffidently: his bald convex forehead; the three horizontal and parallel furrows that were etched almost from one temple to the other; the faded blue eyes; the sparse, too emphatically arched eyebrows that gave his whole physiognomy a perennially uncertain and perplexed expression; the nose, rather pronounced, and yet handsome, well designed, aristocratic; the lips, big and protuberant, a little like a woman’s; the chin disfigured at its tip by a kind of dint in the form of a comma; the brick-red colouration of his long, lugubrious cheeks, darkened with stubble that was so black it seemed blueish. How malicious and unpleasant, even absurd, his face was! His mother had always maintained, with gratification, naturally, how much it resembled that of the former King Umberto. T
hat might well be so. One thing for sure was that, if the current tide of Communism were to keep on swelling – truly one couldn’t see who might be able to halt it … De Gasperi?fn2 With a face like that? – all the proprietors of farms of a certain size, and among these, as Fate would have it, they too, the Limentani, with their La Montina estate of over 400 hectares, would, very soon, be forced to relinquish their ownership.

  He began to lather his face, starting with the point of his chin. And as the lines of his face gradually disappeared under the foam, he began to feel, even more markedly than before, the burden of the day of hunting that awaited him.

  It was he alone who had decided on it. And why had he done so? To what end? Wouldn’t it have been far better to give up on the idea of going to the hide for a duck shoot? His cousin, Ulderico Cavaglieri, for instance, although he’d settled for good in Codigoro (and therefore within a stone’s throw of the valleys), although, protected, as ever, by the big patriarchal Catholic family he’d amassed over some fifteen years, and even though he could at this stage entirely disregard the Communists, as, earlier on, he’d disregarded the Fascists of the Salò Republic and the German SS, all the same, even he hadn’t considered it wise to hang around waiting for the worst all this time. On the contrary. In 1938, in the autumn of ’38, soon after the Racial Laws had been declared – Ulderico was then forty years old, while he himself was now forty-five – no, he hadn’t let that deny him his gun licence. Not a chance. He hadn’t even put in a request, as it had simply been renewed. And in ’45, just after the Liberation, he had taken care not to make the mistake of reapplying for it.

  He shaved with his usual care, after which, waiting for the bath to fill, he slipped out of his pyjama bottoms and sat on the toilet. For some years emptying his bowels in the morning had become a bit troublesome, and when he couldn’t go – either because he’d eaten too much the evening before or because he’d got up too early – then for the whole day he’d feel in the worst of moods, and even suffer from palpitations. As he’d expected, today wasn’t going to be easy. But it would hardly be a good idea setting off in this state! There was the risk that he’d have to stop halfway, perhaps without even the possibility of washing.

  So he sat there, in the thunderous roar of the water cascading into the bath, keeping an eye on its level, which was rising meanwhile. He thought about the hunt in the valley, about how it had been before the war and how it might be now. Before the war – he remembered – a gentleman from Ferrara could go and fire off a few shots in the region of Codigoro or Comacchio on a Sunday and be quite sure of a good reception and of general respect. More than that, from the practical, the organizational perspective, everything would be precisely pre-arranged – and one could tell that it had been so for centuries – because that same gentleman would find it straightforward to travel and stay there, and have something to eat, in short to find everything he needed in situ. But today? Apart from already being a considerable danger, travelling through the countryside in an automobile – exactly as in 1919 or 1920 there were those who had seen a windscreen smashed by a big millstone thrown by persons unknown from behind a hedge – what else might one expect to find there, with or without a double-barrelled shotgun slung over his shoulder, except dark looks, backs stubbornly turned or even open and challenging sneers? The times of courteous smiles, of the doffing of hats, of respectful bows, were over. For everyone – the politically and the racially persecuted alike.

  He thought, too, as for several months he had been unable not to, of the unpleasant occurrence that befell him, he of all people, last April at La Montina, that day he decided to go and see how the land-levelling works were proceeding.

  What a brilliant idea! And, above all, what a glorious scene! He once again saw himself in the midst of endless fields, seated on the verge of a ditch, with some thirty field hands – familiar faces, for the most part, the majority of whom he’d known for years and years – who, ready to bring their raised hoes down on his skull, demanded the immediate revision of their sharecropping agreements. He’d had no option but to yield, and Galassi-Tarabini, his family solicitor, whom he had consulted as soon as he returned to town, had unconditionally approved of his ‘tactic’. And yet, this was what had resulted from the advice that his lawyer had then dispensed: not to give the least regard to the promise he had given, but rather to report the threats of violence he’d suffered to the Codigoro Carabinieri: from that day on he had not dreamed of setting foot in La Montina again, so his manager and accountant, Prearo, needed to visit the farm on his own every now and then, in order to tally his accounts with Benazzi, the farm overseer. And because, since 1939, the entire inheritance of agricultural land and property of the deceased Leone Limentani was now in the name of his daughter-in-law, Nives, Nives Pimpinati, Catholic, Aryan and, at that time, eight months pregnant, his son, Edgardo, and his widow, Erminia Calabresi, his direct heirs, could now consider, definitively, the over four hundred hectares of the holding if not also the Ferrara house in Via Mentana, where for good or ill they still lived, the property of another person.

  Apart from Galassi-Tarabini and his accountant, Prearo, he had never spoken to a soul about the incident at La Montina, neither to his mother nor to his wife. His mother, for sure – just a glance at her and you could see how unruffled she was – had heard nothing about it up until now. But Signora Nives? Could it be possible that she hadn’t been informed of everything by Prearo, with whom he would so often see her confabulating in the office? Then, with respect to the farming community of Codigoro and its district, as far at least as Pomposa – and above all to the community of farm labourers – fat chance that they wouldn’t have dinned the whole affair into the heads of all and sundry at the local trade union council!

  But precisely because of this, if that was how things were, what point would there be in risking worse, what the devil would make him take that chance? Was it worth provoking further trouble, perhaps even of a physical nature, for the simple desire to fire off some shots?

  Which was more important, all things considered, the hunt or else …?

  Abruptly he decided to wait no longer.

  ‘It’s all pointless, anyway,’ he grumbled morosely.

  He lifted himself up, shifted to one side and stretched out over the bath to turn off the taps, and was standing upright once again.

  In the meantime, the room had filled up with thick, tepid steam.

  2

  Standing motionless before the closed door, touching the latch without lowering it, he wondered if he might still manage to slope off unnoticed.

  His mother and his wife had said goodbye to him the previous evening, when, soon after dinner, he’d left them in the dining-room to knit away in silence in front of the smoking coals of the fireplace. It was true: the previous evening he hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Rory, his baby girl, since he’d come home from the Unione club at nine and by nine Rory would already have been asleep for a good hour. Yet now was certainly not the time to hesitate. If giving Rory a kiss meant he’d have to face an additional series of goodbyes from Nives, who occupied the double bedroom next to his own, opposite the baby’s room (his mother’s bedroom looked out at the front: far enough away and safely isolated, by the grace of God!), then, no thanks, he would willingly do without that kiss.

  He opened the door slowly.

  As soon as he was outside he switched on the light, turned to shut the door, then made a few tentative steps across the linoleum of the corridor. Although he was wearing short American military boots without nails in their soles, nevertheless, he put down his feet with extreme care. His usual weight was about eighty kilograms. But today, swathed as he was in his hunting clothes, and laden with the weight of two rifles, the Browning and his old Three Rings Krupp, today, without a doubt, he must have weighed another twenty kilos. The merest creak provoked by his hundred kilos from the parquet beneath the lino, and Nives, who had always been a light sleeper, would in all likelihood wake up and cal
l him.

  ‘’Dgardo!’

  ‘Ssh!’ was his instinctive reply.

  Who knows how, but Nives had managed to hear him. ‘What a pain!’ he grumbled. If he didn’t immediately enter her room, she’d be sure to start yelling for him.

  He poked his head into the utterly dark room.

  ‘Ssh! What’s wrong? Wait a second.’

  It irked him to have to enter his wife’s bedroom with the rifles, the cartridge belt round his belly, and all his gear: the five-shot rifle in its conspicuous bag of écru leather, especially, which, despite every declared programme of tight economy, he had bought only last September at Gualandi’s, the foremost gunsmith in Bologna. Slowly then, taking pains with every movement, he offloaded the Browning, hanging it from its strap on the window-handle there at his side. He was about to do the same with the double-barrelled shotgun; but there’d be no harm showing that gun to Nives, he reflected. She had seen it in his hands even as far back as their time in Codigoro, when she was only his mistress, so that, most likely, she would hardly notice it now. It could also serve to avoid a scene of any kind – an intention of that sort wasn’t out of the question: she was more than capable of starting a quarrel at such a moment – by making it clear to her he was just about to leave, and hadn’t a minute to spare for a chat or anything else.

  He entered the room.

  Nives was switching on the bedside-table lamp. With his right-hand thumb hooked between the gun’s leather strap and the bristly tweed of his jacket, he moved towards the centre of the room. And so, approaching the double bed of carved pinkish wood, where he, the only son, had been conceived, and where from 1939 on he had slept so rarely with his wife, for the second time that morning he felt himself pervaded by a strange sense of absurdity. Once again, it was as if between himself and the things he saw around him a thin transparent layer of glass had been interposed. Everything, there, on the other side, and he, on this side, looking at them one by one in a state of wonder.