by André Aciman
Intimidated, she would make no further attempt at closeness. She would quickly return her gaze to the screen, and from then on David would be down there, in the middle of the large grey luminescent rectangle that filled the end of the auditorium, intent on lighting a cigarette with his gloved hands, dancing in his dinner jacket, or staring into the eyes of stunningly beautiful women, pressing himself against their breasts, kissing them lingeringly on the mouth . . . The film so entranced her that later, when it was over, and she was outside again, if David slipped an arm under hers and speaking in caressing tones, offered to accompany her home the same way they’d come, she would violently start awake, as from a kind of sleep.
“It’s only a little longer, that way,” David would urge her.
“But it’s late, my mother was expecting me back at midnight,” she tried to reply. “And then the cold, it’ll be all wet . . .”
How much better it would be, she thought in the meantime, to return home by cutting back through the center of town! With the mist that had descended—in those two hours it had become so dense that the yellow lights of the streetlamps could barely be seen—no one, they could be sure, would have noticed them, not even if they’d passed by the Listone cafe, or if they’d taken the Corso Giovecca. They could have slowly walked along the sidewalks slippery with the damp, their lips and eyelashes laden with the tepid droplets, holding each other tightly like two real, proper fiancés, and talking, God—or rather David—willing. What would he have talked about? Perhaps the film (what a ham the main actor was!—he would have said—and also the star, what a silly thing she was!), or perhaps about himself, his studies, his plans for the future . . . Finally, before parting, they might even have been able to slip into some small cafe, one of those in the Saraceno district or in Via Borgo di Sotto. Seating them both in a corner, David would then have ordered two small drinks. After which, in the warmth, sipping the anisette and thinking of soon going to bed and to sleep, she could have felt, have been infused with, if not happiness, at least a sense of being in tune with herself and with life.
But instead she would give in.
And they would quickly make their way toward the city walls, away from the bicycle bells of the local lads who would hang around the cinema’s still wide-open glass doors, talking in loud voices about sports or who knows what, or else eating roast chestnuts bought for a few centesimi from the old woman with the black shawl, the woolen half-gloves, the grey overcoat, forever stooped there over her little cast-iron griddle, they would be catcalling to her with whistles, shouts, disrespectful hisses and swear words. It was no use hurrying past. The ever-growing distance seemed to render the cries even more acute and penetrating. They followed her closely. Like cold, clammy hands which tried to grasp her, to touch her under her clothes.
With the first darkness, in the first field they came to, she was pushed down on to the grass. With her chin on his shoulder, without closing her eyes, she let him do what he wanted.
Later, she would be the first to get up. And if, at a certain point, she felt the desire to struggle beneath him, to bite him, do him harm (David never resisted this: instead, relaxing his long back, he would lean on her with his whole weight), that was when her rage, the sort of anger which lately had induced her to push him off her, would suddenly give way to a tremendous feeling of anxiety, of fear. How far away he already was! she thought, while she strained to get up, to smooth down her dress. Nothing at all mattered to him, now! And yet, why consider him the guilty party? Hadn’t she herself been perfectly able to imagine how the evening would end? From when they met, in front of the street entrance, hardly exchanging a greeting, from when they had hurriedly walked toward the city walls, everything had been utterly predictable.
They went on their way.
She was fully aware of all this. He was cold and distracted. Nothing he could say now would do anything but wound her. And yet she would provoke him.
For example, she would ask him: “What’s your mother’s name again?”
As David kept silent, she would reply on his behalf, with slow emphasis: “Teresa.”
Wasn’t it funny that she’d ask such pointless questions, and then that it should be her replying, stressing each syllable like a schoolgirl being tested?
“And Marina,” she continued, “what is your sister Marina called?”
She burst out laughing, then repeated: “Ma-ri-na.”
Hastening his steps over the frost-hardened ground, David yawned. But he finally decided to speak.
What he uttered was strange and muffled. There was without doubt some truth in it, but also—and it sufficed to listen carefully to his tone, to realize this—a great deal of fiction. He spoke in general about himself, and especially about his “romantic involvement” with a young lady of the highest society, about whom, without disclosing her name, he kept on boasting, not just about her beauty, but also her urbane manners, her aristocratic and refined tastes. Their meetings, their tiffs (since, it seemed, they often quarrelled) always occurred in the midst of glittering occasions: a charity ball at the Unione Club, that would have been attended by the nobility, a gala showing at the City Theater, a gallop in the country which ended in a spectacular gathering at some beautiful villa encircled by a vast park. All things considered, it was “a far from smooth relationship,” hindered by both families, certainly, but “solely” due to their different religions: a relationship in whose context the “thing” that they had just done, in the field, would never, even by mistake, be mentioned . . . In the meantime, they had come down from the city walls, and entered Via Salinguerra. And if, till that moment she had been listening in silence, almost holding her breath, as soon as she gathered, from the shapes of the houses and the streetlamps, that in a few moments they would have to part, this caused her to suffer a nervous agitation of such intensity as to make her fear she might lose all control. Oh, how she hated, at that moment, her miserable, worn-out coat, her ruffled hair, flattened at the temples by the damp, her common-looking hands, deformed by work and frost! But what could she do then but try to keep calm? Small of stature, without the least attraction, of physique or personality (if only she’d played the tart a bit more!), she might as well accept her fate now, since it had already been sealed. Who knows? If at that point she’d been able to keep her composure, perhaps David would have been grateful to her. Perhaps in the future he’d have been able to treat her like an old friend to whom every request is conceded, who’d be able to give him any advice, even the most unwelcome. Not much to ask? Little enough. Still, better than nothing.
By then they’d have gone through the gate and reached the entrance.
Though his voice was reduced to a whisper, David kept on talking. What was he saying?
Soon after he graduated—he might, for example, be saying—he would get the hell out, not only of Ferrara, but of Italy. He was fed up with the tedious life of the provinces, of rotting in this hole of a city. Almost certainly he would be off to America, to stay there and settle, definitively.
With whom would he go to America? she had risked asking him on one occasion. Alone, or with that young lady he liked so much?
“Alone,” he’d replied, annoyed.
He wasn’t the type to marry, he’d added. Anyone. As things were now, all he wanted was a change of air, he’d already told her. Nothing more than that.
She had said nothing in reply. She’d merely nodded in the dark.
Another time though—and she would regret it later, in bed, when the ticking of the alarm clock on the bedside table and the wheezing noise her mother made while sleeping had kept her awake—she had burst out laughing.
She had asked him: “And if I got pregnant?”
She was well aware that a question of this kind would succeed in detaining David for another five minutes. What he would say in those five minutes didn’t matter to her. What mattered was that before going he would feel obliged to kiss her.
6.
THE WINTER of 1
929 was unusually hard. To find another to compare to it, Oreste Benetti declared, you’d have to go back as far as the famous winter of 1903, when even the river Po was frozen over, or perhaps to the winter of 1917.
It began to snow before Christmas, and it kept snowing until the eve of Epiphany. Yet the cold was still a long way from the extraordinary levels it would reach in the following months. There was even, just after Epiphany, a brief interlude of sun, almost spring-like in its warmth, and the snow had already begun to melt.
“Can it be trusted?” Maria Mantovani wondered.
From the bed, where since around the start of December she had been confined because of a feverish flu, which had left her face lined and her chest racked by an ugly cough, the old woman listened to the splashing and squelching from the occasional vehicle that passed along Via Salinguerra. No, it couldn’t be trusted, she ended by replying to herself, the corners of her mouth turned down in a bitter expression. That spell of warmth, but rather than warmth all that mist which from the early afternoon onward swept in from the surrounding countryside and seemed to drench everything just as if it were rain, didn’t help at all in fostering any illusions.
Then, as soon as he came in (he now came in without ringing the bell, as Lida had given him a key some time ago), Oreste Benetti divested himself of his sodden greatcoat, hung it on a nail sticking out of the entrance door. He came down the stairs, happy as can be. At length, after seating himself, as ever, at the head of the table, he began to talk.
For a couple of months, that is, since Ireneo had started going to the seminary, the main topic of his speeches had been the boy himself. Naturally, he was saying, there was no point in rushing to decide. All the same, in his modest opinion, from now on it was worth considering what job Ireneo would do when he was grown-up. The first three years at junior high school—those in any case he ought to do. But afterward? Take him out of school and put him immediately to work somewhere? No—they agreed that wasn’t an option. And yet once he’d got his certificate from middle school, a choice regarding the various schools (at Ferrara it wasn’t as if there was only the high school, no, there were the Training Colleges, the Technical Institute from which one graduated as an accountant or surveyor, not to mention the Industrial Institute in the Vicolo Mozzo Roversella!), a choice of one kind or another couldn’t be avoided.
One evening, on his arrival, not without solemnity, he announced that that very afternoon he had dropped in at the seminary. He was invited in by Don Bonora, the director, who had taken over some twenty years ago from poor Don Castelli, and he had asked him about Ireneo.
“What can I say?” Don Bonora had at first somewhat guardedly replied. “We are just starting out on logical analysis and grammar. We have yet to begin a real study of Latin . . .”
He had then tried to sound out the director on what he thought of Ireneo’s character. To which, the priest, although continuing to express himself with great prudence and tact, had replied that yes, effectively, the boy’s character gave him some cause for concern. It was too early, you understand, he had added, to formulate any definitive judgement of him . . . but that we were dealing with a slightly weak, distracted character, of this, unfortunately, there seemed to him little doubt.
The bookbinder compressed his lips. Then, all of a sudden, he began to talk of the weather.
“In my opinion, we’re not clear of it,” he declared, raising his eyes to the ceiling and sniffing the air cautiously, “the worst is yet to come.”
And Maria Mantovani, stretched out on her bed at the end of the room (from the table where the bookbinder and Lida usually sat facing each other, one could see nothing but her pallid prominent nose, with the two black vertical holes of her nostrils), immediately nodded in agreement, smiling in silence at some private thought.
Oreste Benetti was right. The worst of the winter was yet to come. At the start of the last third of January, as it happened, the sky once again became overcast, the temperature dropped, and as vicious gusts disturbed the air, it began to snow again with a furious intensity. It was like being high up in the mountains. Reduced to mere pathways, or narrow tracks arduously kept clear by the teams of shovellers the town council had hurriedly employed, the streets, especially the smaller ones, provided thoroughfare only for pedestrians. Since the snow had fallen, and the city walls had become the destination for enthusiastic crowds of impromptu skiers, mainly students, at a certain point it was decided by the Fascist Federation, to promote competitions up there, and especially along that stretch of the walls that runs between Porta San Giorgio and Porta Reno. This meant that Via Salinguerra, usually so deserted and silent, became transformed from one day to the next into a gathering place of much noise and bustle.
Quite suddenly Maria Mantovani’s health worsened. Her fever began to run high; she became breathless. A doctor was called, and after a rapid examination, he announced that she was suffering from pneumonia. Was she in danger? Without doubt she was! the doctor confirmed, in reply to the direct question addressed to him by the little man of advanced years, perhaps a relative, who had called him out. The general condition of the patient which, even at a cursory glance, looked precarious, hardly promised a happy outcome.
Predicted and feared, the crisis came on the fifth day following.
Maria Mantovani didn’t take her eyes off the window. Beyond the glass, which the daylight struggled to filter through, she could make out the snow falling thickly, in scurries. She seemed to be struggling to hear. Via Salinguerra resounded feebly with happy cries and hurrying footsteps. What was going on out there? she wondered. It was as if the city were having a celebration. But how come every voice, every sound, seemed to reach her from so far away?
“I can’t hear clearly,” she complained. “I can’t hear anymore. It’s as if my ears have been stuffed with cotton wool.”
“It’s snowing,” Lida replied softly, sitting at the bedside. “That’s why it all sounds so muffled to you.”
The old woman gave a knowing little laugh.
“It’s not as though it’s because of that,” she murmured, shaking her head and lowering her eyelids.
After a couple of hours her wheezing became a death rattle. A priest ought to be called. And the bookbinder, who had suddenly vanished, in fact quickly returned with the parish priest of Santa Maria in Vado.
In the meantime the room had filled with people.
They were mainly the women of the neighborhood who, although no one had alerted them, spontaneously appeared. How had they got in? Lida found herself wondering. Was it possible that Oreste (Oreste, heavens—she noticed herself calling him simply by his first name, which she had never done before . . .), was it possible that Oreste had forgotten to shut the front door behind him? However it had happened, a half-hour later, when the priest had gone away, the neighbors didn’t leave the room. They all stayed: huddled underneath the window with their shawls over their heads and fervently whispering.
Rigid in the center of the room, Oreste Benetti held his hands together.
As soon as the death rattle ceased he came forward and leaned over the sickbed. Lightly and precisely, his hands moved to close the half-open eyes of Maria Mantovani, to cross her skeletal arms over her chest, and then, with a final, dextrous touch, to smooth the rumpled sheet and reposition the coverlet which had slipped almost entirely on to the floor.
All this time, until the bookbinder, having finished his work, was on the point of leaving soundlessly, Lida hadn’t made a single movement. But even after those big busy hands had withdrawn, hands that belonged to the man who, soon enough, she knew it as a certainty by now, would become her husband, even afterward, she stayed there seated beside the bed, to stare at the waxen profile of her mother. Her almost closed eyelids, her nose that suddenly appeared too big, too prominent, her lips hinting at a vague, absurdly happy smile: the whole, all-too-familiar physiognomy revealed itself as different at a stroke, so much so that it was as if only then was she able to perceive
it in all its particularity. As if she could keep on and on staring at her mother’s face. While she did so, she felt something old, something bitter, something hard slowly dissolving within her.
She covered her face with her hands and began to weep silently.
Finally she raised her head, turning her eyes full of tears toward the bookbinder.
“Leave me be,” she said in a low voice. “You too, Oreste,” she added, nodding, “go away as well.”
“Quite, quite, my dear . . .” he stammered, intimidated.
The neighborhood women were already leaving. After he’d tagged along behind their group halfway up the stairs, Oreste was the last to reach the landing and, closing the door, the last to disappear.
With her elbow resting on the sickbed and her cheek on her palm, Lida, left alone, thought about her mother, about herself, about their two lives. But she was mainly thinking of David, and the room in the big apartment block on Via Mortara where, at the beginning of that distant spring, she had gone to live with him.
It had happened like this.
One evening, at the end of winter—that same winter during which, because of the boredom and irritability which showed in David’s every word and gesture, she was expecting any moment for him to say to her, “That’s enough, Lida, from now on it would be better if we stopped seeing each other,” and she was eaten away by this waiting—an evening just like many others, David had suggested to her out of the blue that they “set up house together like any normal working-class couple” in the big apartment block on Via Mortara. He had decided to make a clean break with his family, he had added, in order to “forge a new life for himself.” He was prepared to live in a “garret,” a “fine, poetic garret under the eaves,” with a view not only of the whole city, but also “of the countryside as far as the hills of Bologna.” In order “to support his family” he’d be willing “to work in the sugar factory” . . . And she? What else could she do apart from immediately assenting, as she had on that other occasion, the first, when, meeting him by chance in the open-air locale of Borgo San Giorgio (she being at that time little more than sixteen, in every way a mere girl) they had remained together as a couple for the whole evening, and then, toward midnight, ended up in a field close by the city walls? Yet again, she hadn’t asked herself a thing, hadn’t hesitated for a single moment. A few evenings later, she had left the house with a bundle under her arms which her mother, as usual, hadn’t dared to comment on, though had surely noticed. Just like that: Goodbye! What madness! And yet, only later, much later, after having given birth, when she had returned to stay alone in the room at the big apartment block, and the child wouldn’t stop crying, and she sensed her breasts every day were producing less and less milk, and she had hardly any lire left, only then did she begin to rouse herself from the long waking dream that her life had been until then.
