by André Aciman
In his concluding essay, “Down There, at the End of the Corridor,” Bassani describes how, when composing his stories, he would find a geometric image taking shape in his mind. His account is oddly like the dream of the ouroboros that helped Friedrich August Kekulé resolve the chemical structure of the benzene ring. One such image that presides over “A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini” is of two spheres circling one another, the two spheres being the irreconcilable entities: the city of Ferrara and Geo Josz. It’s an image that could serve beyond the particular story’s parameters for the entire Romanzo. If we see one orbiting circle as Bassani, or his various narrators, and the wall-encircled city of Ferrara as the other, we might have a simplified vision of the intricate construction and interlocking of these six books.
The geometrical images that guided Bassani—his visual imagination likely fostered by his study of art history—highlight a significant feature of his fiction. It is an exploration not only of time lost and time preserved but of space—especially architectural and urban spaces: cemeteries, gardens, streets, porticoes, and, foremost among these, the Jewish Temple described with such virtuosity in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. But even domestic interiors in Bassani are laden with significance. The cramped basement flat in “Lida Mantovani,” “Professor” Ermanno Finzi-Contini’s crowded study, Dr. Fadigati’s surgery, with its aspirational elegance, and the storeroom in Dr. Elia Corcos’s mansion are just a few examples of the way space shapes and impinges upon the lives of his characters. Perhaps the most intriguing interior description is of the chemist’s room in “A Night in ’43”—the room from which Pino Barilari witnesses the massacre of Ferrara’s citizens by the squad of Blackshirts and which Bassani approaches with an extraordinary circuitous tact. But none of these instances serve a merely decorative purpose; they are, rather, manifestations of time, or magnetic force fields for history.
The city walls—the “bastioni,” as Bassani often metonymically refers to them—are both literal and metaphorical, and are not only the traditional place for romantic trysts but offer views out beyond into the flat countryside of the Po Valley; they are also the site of the first real encounter between the narrator and Micòl. The city walls are topped with a broad tree-lined avenue, along which one can walk or cycle almost uninterruptedly the entire nine-kilometer circumference of the city. (And Ferrara is still one of the few Italian cities where bicycles are the main mode of transport.) One frequently mentioned site, just within the walls at the southeast of the city, is Montagnone (“the big mountain”), which is actually a small hill built from the stone left from the construction of the walls and later turned into a garden. These walls, encrusted with history, are the verdant lookouts and the protective but also imprisoning circle for the many lives that Bassani’s fiction illuminates, and there are walls within the walls—the inner walls encircle what was once the ghetto, walled in when Ferrara became one of the Papal States, which leads Bassani to describe his community as “intra muros.”
Time is not only factored into the tenses and structure of the narrative but is integral to the style and syntax. The characteristically long sentences, rich in subclauses and lengthy embedded parentheses—a translator’s challenge, or nightmare—have a way of slowing up time, which is moving toward an ineluctable and fatal conclusion, and resembles those tennis matches played in the idyllic garden of the Finzi-Continis deep into dusk when the ball becomes all but invisible yet the play continues. A more declared sense of the passage of time is perceptible in The Heron, which begins when Limentani awakens to the insistent but discreet alarm of his Jaeger clock, and continues as on almost every page he anxiously consults his Swiss Vacheron-Constantin wristwatch to check the time as it elapses. The whole story takes a day (and Bassani speculated that the experience of reading it might be of the same duration)—a day we assume to be the last day in the protagonist’s life, and so observing an inexorable Aristotelian unity. (The four sections of the novel, each comprising six chapters, amount, aptly enough, to twenty-four.) The only passage where this succession is suspended is during a midafternoon sleep, which disrupts the tedium of clock time with a bright and confusing dream time that accurately tells of the character’s psychic disturbance, the way he is utterly out of step with his times. A well-off, land-owning Jew, he has returned from Swiss exile after the defeat of Fascism to find that he is hated by his tenants and effectively estranged from his home and his Christian wife, while the ex-Fascist Bellagamba, a bullying Blackshirt, has adapted perfectly to the new regime and has set up a prospering hotel restaurant in the neighboring small town of Codigoro.
The actual places and factual dates—sometimes, as I’ve mentioned, the two combine on memorial plaques and monuments—are Bassani’s material, and I can think of no other writer of fiction so concerned with factuality. He claimed to be “one of the few, the very few, contemporary writers who places dates in the context of what he writes.” When Vittorio de Sica made his cinematic version of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and had the narrator’s father in the end transported to the death camps, Bassani indignantly withdrew his name from the film. That “it didn’t happen like that” would seem a strange objection from a novelist, but this gives us an idea of how significant historical veracity was to Bassani. Nevertheless—and this is where the overarching title of Romanzo needs to be kept in mind—only through the imaginative liberties he learned how to take, with the material he knew so intimately, could the novelist arrive, as he so convincingly does, at such a fierce and truthful evocation of the reality he, his community, and his city lived through.
THE NOVEL OF FERRARA
: I :
Within the Walls
Lida Mantovani
1.
TURNING back to the distant years of her youth, always, for as long as she lived, Lida Mantovani remembered the birth with emotion, and especially the days just before it. Whenever she thought about it, she was deeply moved.
For more than a month she had lived stretched out on a bed, at the end of a corridor, and for all that time she had done nothing but stare through the usually wide-open window opposite at the leaves of the huge, ancient magnolia which surged up right in the middle of the garden below. Then, toward the end, three or four days before her labor pains began, she had suddenly lost interest even in the magnolia’s black leaves, which were shiny, as though they’d been oiled. She had even given up eating. A thing, that’s what she’d shrunk into being: a kind of very swollen and numbed thing—although it was only April, it was already warm—abandoned down there, at the end of a hospital corridor.
She hardly ate anything. But Professor Bargellesi, then head of the maternity ward, would repeat that it was better that way.
He observed her from the foot of the bed.
“It’s really hot,” he’d say, with those frail and reddened fingers of his smoothing his big white beard, stained with nicotine around the mouth. “If you want to breathe as you should, it’s better to keep your weight down. And anyway”—he would add, smiling—“anyway, it seems to me you’re quite fat enough already . . .”
2.
AFTER THE birth, time began to pass once more.
At first, thinking of David—irritated, unhappy, he hardly ever spoke to her, staying in bed for whole days, his face hidden under a book or else sleeping—Lida Mantovani tried to keep going on her own in the furnished room of the big apartment block in Via Mortara where she had lived with him for the last six months. But then, after a few more weeks, convinced that she’d heard the last of him, and realizing that the few hundred lire he’d left her were about to run out, and since, besides, her milk was beginning to run dry, she decided to return home to her mother. So in the summer of that same year, Lida reappeared in Via Salinguerra, and began once more to occupy the unattractive room, with its dusty wooden floor and its two iron beds arranged side by side, where she had spent her childhood, adolescence and the first years of her young adulthood.
Although it had once been a
carpenter’s wood store, entering was by no means easy.
When you made your way into the vestibule, huge and dark as a haybarn, you had to climb up by a little staircase which obliquely cut across the left-hand wall. The staircase led to a low half-door, and having passed the threshold you found your head brushing a ceiling with small beams, and were suddenly faced with a kind of well. God! How sad it all was, Lida said to herself the evening she returned home, lingering for a moment up there to look down . . . and yet, at the same time, what a sense of peace and protection . . . With the baby draped around her neck, she had slowly descended the steps of the inner staircase, and had walked toward her mother, who in the meantime had lifted her eyes from her sewing, and finally leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek. And the kiss, without a single word, greeting or comment having passed between them, was returned.
Almost immediately the question of the baptism had to be confronted.
As soon as she became aware of the situation, the mother crossed herself.
“Are you mad?” she exclaimed.
While the mother spoke, anxiously declaring that there wasn’t a moment to be lost, Lida felt the shriveling of any will to resist. At the maternity ward, when they had crowded around the bed to hold the baby and had excitedly asked what name she meant to give him, she suddenly thought she must do nothing against David, and this made her reply, No, they should hold off for a bit, she wanted to think about it for a while longer. But now, why on earth should she continue to have any scruples? What would she still be waiting for? That very evening the baby was taken to Santa Maria in Vado. It was her mother who had arranged everything, it was she who argued that he should be called Ireneo, in memory of a dead brother of whose existence Lida had never even been aware . . . Mother and daughter had rushed to the church as though pursued. But they returned slowly, as if drained of all energy, along Via Borgo di Sotto, where the municipal lamplighter was doing his rounds, lighting the streetlamps one by one.
The next morning they began working together again.
Seated again as they had once been, as they had always been before, under the rectangular window which opened above them at street level, their foreheads bent over their sewing, rather than speaking of the time they had recently passed through, so bitter for both of them, they preferred, when the occasion arose, to talk of inconsequential things. They felt more closely bound together than before, much better friends. Both of them, all the same, understood that their harmony could only thus be preserved on condition that they avoided any reference to the sole topic on which their closeness depended.
Sometimes, however, unable to resist, Maria Mantovani risked a joke, a veiled allusion.
She might venture with a sigh:
“Ah, all men are the same!”
Or even:
“Men are always on the prowl—that’s for sure.”
At this, having raised her head, she would stare raptly at her daughter, remembering, at the same time, the blacksmith of Massa Fiscaglia, who, twenty years earlier, had taken her virginity and made her pregnant; remembering the rented farmhouse, hidden among the fields two or three kilometers outside Massa, where she had been born and grown up, and which, with a little girl to raise, she had had to leave forever; the greasy, ruffled hair, the fat sensual lips, the lazy gestures of the only man in her life would become superimposed upon the figure of David, the young gentleman of Ferrara, Jewish, it’s true, but belonging to one of the richest and most respected families of the town (those Camaiolis who lived on Corso Giovecca, just imagine, in that big house that they themselves owned), who for a long while had been making love to Lida, but whom she herself had never known, never once seen, even from a distance. She looked, she watched. Thin, sharp, whittled away by suffering and worry, it was as if in Lida she saw herself as a girl. Everything had been repeated, everything. From A to Z.
One evening she suddenly burst out laughing. She grabbed Lida by the hand and dragged her in front of the wardrobe mirror.
“Just look how similar we’ve become,” she said in a stifled voice.
And while nothing was audible in the room except the whisper of the carbide lamp, they remained staring at their faces for a long time, side by side, almost indistinguishable in the misted surface.
That’s not to say that their relations always ran smoothly. Lida was not always prepared to listen without fighting back.
One evening, for example, Maria Mantovani had started telling her own story—something that could never have happened before. At the end she came out with a phrase that made Lida jump to her feet.
“If his parents had been in favor,” she had said, “we’d have got married.”
Lying on the bed, her face hidden in her hands, Lida silently repeated these words, hearing once again the sigh full of resentment which had accompanied them. No, she wouldn’t weep. And, to her mother, who had run after her and who had breathlessly leaned over her, she displayed, as she raised herself up, her cheeks dry, a look full of contempt and boredom.
Otherwise her irritations were rare and if they afflicted her, they did so without warning, like tempestuous squalls on a day of fine weather.
“Lida!” the daughter exclaimed once with a spiteful laugh (her mother was calling her by her name). “How important it was for you when I went to school that I wrote it on my exercise book with that fancy ‘y.’ What on earth did you think I was going to be—a showgirl?”
Maria Mantovani didn’t reply. She smiled. Her daughter’s tantrum transported her back to distant events, events whose significance she alone was in a position to assess. “Lyda!” she kept repeating to herself. She thought about her own youth. She thought of Andrea, Andrea Tardozzi, the Massa Fiscaglia blacksmith who had been her sweetheart, her lover, and would have been her husband. She had come to live in the city with her baby, and every Sunday he travelled sixty kilometers by bicycle, thirty on the way there, and thirty back. He sat there, just where Lida was now sitting. She seemed to see him once again, with his leather jacket, his corduroy trousers, his tousled hair. Until one night, as he was returning to the village, he was taken by surprise by a heavy rain and fell ill with pleurisy. From then on she never saw him again. He had gone to live in Feltre in the Veneto: a small town at the foot of the mountains, where he took a wife and had children. If his parents hadn’t been against it, and if, following that, he hadn’t got ill, he would have married her. That was for sure. What did Lida know? What could she understand? She alone understood everything. For the two of them.
After supper, Lida was usually the first to go to bed. But the other bed, beside the one where she and the baby were already asleep, often remained untouched until late into the night, while in the center of the table, still to be cleared, the gas lamp shed its blueish glow.
3.
RATHER IRREGULAR in shape, its cobblestones partly overgrown with grass, Via Salinguerra is a small, subsidiary street which begins in an ill-shapen square, the result of an ancient demolition, and ends at the foot of the city’s walls quite close to Porta San Giorgio. This places it within the city and not that far from the medieval center: to confirm this impression, you only need to look at the appearance of the houses which flank both its sides, all of them very poor and of modest proportions, and some old and decrepit, undoubtedly among the oldest in Ferrara. And yet, strolling down Via Salinguerra, even today, the kind of silence that surrounds it (heard from here, the city’s church bells have a different timbre, as though muffled and lost) and especially the smell of manure, of ploughed earth, of cowsheds, which reveal the proximity of large hidden vegetable gardens, all contribute to the impression of being outside the circle of the city walls, on the edge of the open countryside.
The restful voices of animals, of chickens, dogs, even oxen, distant bells, agricultural effluvia: sounds and smells even drifted down to the depths of the carpenter’s storehouse where Lida and Maria Mantovani worked in men’s tailoring. Seated just beside the window, almost as motionless and
silent as the grey pieces of furniture behind them—as the table, that is, and the raffia armchairs, and the long narrow beds, the cradle, the wardrobe, the bedside table and three-legged washbowl with the ewer of water beside it, and further back, barely visible, the little door under the stairs which hid the small kitchen and toilet—when they raised their heads from the fabric, it was only to address the odd word to each other, to check that the baby didn’t need anything, to look up outside at the rare passers-by, or, at the sudden shriek of the doorbell hung above the drab rectangle of the street entrance, to decide by a rapid exchange of glances which of the two would have to go upstairs to open it . . .
They passed three years like this.
And it might be supposed that many more would have passed in just the same manner, without any disruption or significant change, when life, which seemed to have forgotten them, suddenly recalled their existence through the person of a neighbor: a certain Benetti, Oreste Benetti, the owner of a bookbinding workshop in Via Salinguerra. The peculiar insistence with which he began to pay them visits in the evening after supper almost immediately assumed, at least for Maria, an unequivocal meaning. Yes—she thought, getting flustered—that Benetti’s coming round expressly to see Lida . . . After all Lida was still young, very young indeed. At once she became lively, bustling, even happy. Without ever interrupting the talks between her daughter and the guest, she confined herself to walking about the room, glad to be there, it was clear, content to be present but self-contained, and to await and observe the emergence of a rare and delightful event.
In the meantime the one who spoke was nearly always the bookbinder. About the years gone by: it seemed that he had no interest in any other topic.
