by André Aciman
4.
AUTUMN CAME to an end. Winter arrived, the long, cold winter that we’re used to in these parts. Then spring returned. And slowly, along with the turning of the seasons, the past also returned.
I don’t know how believable what I am about to relate will be. It’s true that, not so long after, things occurred that would have induced one to imagine that a secret, dynamic relation existed between Geo Josz and Ferrara. Let me explain. Very gradually he grew thin, dried out, by slow steps resuming, apart from the sparse white hair of an absolute silvery whiteness, a face which his hairless cheeks rendered still more youthful, truly like a boy’s. But after the removal of the highest piles of rubble and an initial mania of superficial change had exhausted itself, little by little the city, too, began to reassume its old form of sleepy decrepitude which centuries of clerical decadence succeeding the distant, fierce and glorious times of Ghibelline rule had turned into an immutable mask. In short, everything rolled on and kept going. Geo, on one side, Ferrara and its society (not excluding those Jews who had escaped the massacre) on the other: each of them was suddenly involved in a vast, ineluctable, fatal flurry of activity. In concordance like two spheres attached by gears and spinning in a single, invisible orbit, which nothing could resist, or halt.
Then came May.
So was it just for this? someone smilingly asked. Was it just so that Geo’s blind regret for his lost adolescence should not seem quite so blind, that from the first days of the month rows of beautiful girls began once again slowly and gracefully to pedal back from their trips to the surrounding countryside, arriving by various routes at the center of town with their handlebars overflowing with wild flowers? And besides, wasn’t it for the same reason that the famous Count Scocca, disgorged from who knows what hiding place to lean his back like a little stone idol against the marble half-column which, for centuries, had kept upright one of the three gates to the Ghetto, had returned to his spot right at the corner of Via Vignatagliata and Via Mazzini?
And since, one late afternoon around the 15th of the month, a stream of young cyclists had almost finished their slow and graceful ascent of Via Mazzini itself, and were about to flow into the Piazza delle Erbe and beyond, laughing—before such a spectacle, always new and always the same, no one could surely begrudge the fact that at this point the count should be unwilling to abandon his station. The little stage of Via Mazzini presented on one side, against the sunlight, the serried and luminous ranks of cycling girls, and on the opposite side, grey as the ancient stonework against which he was leaning, Count Lionello Scocca. Well, everyone thought, why should one not be moved by the concrete manifestation of such an allegory, sagely and suddenly harmonizing everything: an anguished, atrocious yesterday, with a today so serene and full of promise? Certainly, it would never have crossed the mind of anyone who suddenly noticed the penniless old patrician resume, as though nothing had happened, one of his once customary vantage points—one from which someone with good eyesight and subtle hearing could scan the whole of Via Mazzini from top to bottom—to reproach him for having been a paid informer of the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo** for years, or having been from 1939 to 1943 the director of the civilian section of the Italo-German Institute of Culture. That black, visibly re-tinted Hitler moustache—not to mention the unmistakable steeply tilted, dull-yellow straw hat, the toothpick gripped between thin lips, the big, sensual nose raised to sniff the reek of rubble that the evening breeze brought with it—might now inspire only sympathetic, even grateful reflections.
So it seemed scandalous that with regard to Count Scocca, all told just a harmless old relic, Geo Josz should behave in a manner that one had to consider alien to any basic sense of decency or discretion. The shock and embarrassment it caused were all the more difficult to swallow precisely because for a good while people had gotten used to smiling with benevolence and understanding at Geo and all his eccentricities, including his aversion to the so-called “wartime beards.” By the same standard, one could recognize a certain appropriateness that the faces of many gentlemen should now finally dare once more to show themselves in the light of day. And on this topic it was true, true as can be (reasoned one of the better informed) that the lawyer Geremia Tabet, Geo’s maternal uncle, had not cut off his beard and perhaps never would. But Good Lord, a poor creature like him! He also deserved a bit of understanding! It wouldn’t be that hard. Enough to make the connection between that pathetic, grey, pointed beard and the black Fascist jacket, the shiny high, black boots, the black felt fez which for years and years that fine professional had always displayed when he would turn up between midday and one o’clock every Sunday at the Caffè della Borsa, and whoever there was that might want to make a fuss about that would soon lose the courage to say a word.
From the beginning, what happened seemed impossible. No one could believe it. They just couldn’t imagine a scene in which Geo, who entered with his usual padded steps into Count Scocca’s field of vision as he stood at the corner of Via Vignatagliata, then, with a sudden bestial fury, delivered to the parchmenty cheeks of that old, resuscitated carrion two dry, really hard slaps, more worthy of a Fascist trooper of Balbo and his companions’ times, as someone actually remarked, rather than of a survivor of the German gas chambers. In any case, it really happened—dozens of people saw it. But on the other hand, wasn’t it odd that, straight away, different and contrasting accounts as to exactly what had happened should have circulated? It made one almost doubt, not only the basis of each of these accounts but even the real, objective event itself, that same double slap, so full and resounding, according to general opinion, as to be heard for almost the entire length of Via Mazzini, from the corner of Piazza delle Erbe, down there at the end, as far at least as the Jewish Temple.
For many, Geo’s gesture remained unprovoked and inexplicable.
A little before, he had been seen walking in the same direction as the girls on bicycles, letting himself be slowly overtaken by this procession and never once looking away from the street, his gaze full of stupefaction and joy. Having thus arrived in front of Count Scocca, and abruptly detaching his gaze from a trio of cyclists who had then come parallel with the Oratory of San Crispino, Geo stood stock still, as if the presence of the count, in that place and at that moment, seemed inconceivable to him. His halt, in any case, lasted no more than a second or two, the time required to knit his eyebrows, clench his lips and teeth, convulsively ball up his hands and mutter some words without sense. After which, as though released by a spring, Geo literally leaped on the poor count, who, until that moment, had showed no sign at all of having noticed him.
Is that the whole story? And yet there had been a motive, others objected, and a good one at that! Agreed, Count Scocca might not have been aware of Geo’s arrival. Even if rather strange, that couldn’t at all be discounted. But as for Geo, however, how was it possible to believe that just at the moment in which the three girls he was gazing fixedly at were about to disappear into the golden haze of Piazza delle Erbe, he had had the time or even the desire to notice the count?
According to these last, instead of merely observing the already almost vesperal scene, with no other concern than to immerse himself in the vague sense of how much the city and he were in perfect harmony, the count had actually done something provocative. And this something, which no one who was passing at a distance of more than a couple of yards could have possibly observed—for the good reason, among other things, that despite everything, the eternal toothpick continued to shift from one to the other corner of his mouth—this something consisted in a subtle sibilance, so weak as to seem shyly casual, an idle little fortuitous whistle, in short, which would surely have remained unnoticed if the tune it hinted at had been anything other than that of “Lili Marlene”:
Underneath the lantern by the barrack-gate . . .
the count whistled softly but clearly, his own gaze also, despite his seventy or more years, fixed rapturo
usly on the cycling girls. Who can say? Perhaps having stopped his whistling for a moment, he had joined his own voice to the unanimous chorus that rippled along the sidewalk of Via Mazzini, murmuring in dialect, “Praised be the Lord for these beauties!” or even, “Bless you all and the busty saint who protects you!” But what good did it do him? Fortune decreed that that lazy, innocent whistling—innocent, you understand, to anyone else except Geo—rose to his lips just a fraction too soon. And the outcome for him was those two slaps.
There existed a third version, however, and the third, like the first, didn’t mention either “Lili Marlene” or any other whistling, whether more or less innocent or provocative.
According to this last interpretation, it had been the count who stopped Geo. “Ah ha!” he had said, under his breath, when he saw him so close. Geo had immediately halted. Then the count had engaged him in conversation, hitting the bull’s-eye the first time by announcing his full name: “Look who it isn’t!” he had said. “Could it really be Ruggero Josz, the eldest son of poor Angiolino?” For Lionello Scocca knew everything about Ferrara, and the nearly two years he had had to spend in hiding around Piacenza, just the other side of the river Po, under a false name, had not in the least clouded his memory or weakened his famous ability to recognize at a single glance one face in a thousand. And so, well before Geo had leaped on him and given him those violent slaps, for some minutes they had kept on talking calmly, the count interrogating Geo about his father, for whom, he had said, he always had the greatest affection, gathering the most detailed information about the fate of the rest of his family, including Pietruccio, and congratulating Geo on having survived it all; with Geo, on his side, replying sometimes a little awkwardly or reluctantly, it’s true, but nevertheless replying. In conclusion, they seemed no different at all from a couple of townsfolk lingering on the sidewalk to talk of this and that, waiting for darkness to fall. And yet the slaps still needed to be explained. How the devil had they come about? In the opinion of those who gave this account, and who never tired of returning to the theme with the most various of analyses and surmises, it was this that revealed quite what a bizarre character Geo was; it was this that showed just what an “enigma” he was.
5.
HOWEVER IT actually happened, what’s certain is that after that evening in May everything changed. Whoever wished to understand, understood. The others, the majority, at least realized that something serious and irreparable had occurred, the consequences of which could not now be avoided. They would have to put up with them.
It was the day after, for example, that people truly saw just how thin Geo had become during this period.
An absurd scarecrow—to the general wonder, unease and alarm, he reappeared dressed in the same clothes he had worn when he’d returned from Germany the preceding August, including the fur cap and the leather jacket. Now they fitted him so loosely—it was clear he hadn’t made the least effort to take them in—that they seemed to be draped on a clothes hanger. People saw him coming up the Corso Giovecca in the morning sun which gaily and peacefully shone down upon his rags, and couldn’t believe their eyes. So that was how he really was! they thought. In the last months he’d done nothing but grow thinner and thinner, bit by bit, till he was nothing but skin and bones! But no one could raise a laugh. To see him crossing the Corso Giovecca at the City Theater, then taking the Corso Roma (he had crossed the road as fearful of the cars and bicycles as an old man . . .), there were very few of them who didn’t feel themselves inwardly shudder.
And so, from that morning on, without changing his style of dress again, Geo installed himself, one might say, as a fixture at the Caffè della Borsa in Corso Roma, where even if the general, already fading condemnation of the Black Brigade’s recent torturers and assassins still held them at bay, still kept them in hiding, the old club-wielding dispensers of castor-oil purges from 1922 and ’24, which the war had somewhat cast into oblivion, began to show themselves again one by one. Clad in rags, Geo stared from his table at the little group of these latter figures with an air between challenge and imploration, and his behavior contrasted, to his disadvantage as you can guess, with the timidity, the evident desire not to draw too much attention to themselves which these ex-despots expressed with every gesture. By now old, innocuous, with the signs of wreckage that the years of misfortune had stamped mainly on their faces, and yet still reserved, well mannered, properly dressed, these latter persons displayed a demeanor that was a great deal more human, more decent, and more deserving of sympathy, even. So what after all did Geo Josz really want? a great many people once again began to ask, all of them in agreement that the period immediately after the war, which was so propitious for an examination of both the private and collective conscience, was now over, and this was a luxury that could no longer be afforded. It was the same old question, but framed with the brutal impatience that life, imperious in its demands, at this point unambiguously reasserted.
For these reasons, with the exception of Uncle Daniele, who was always brimming with indignation and a polemical impulse at the “conspicuous” presence at those same tables of some of the most renowned members of Ferrara’s earliest Fascist squads, it became increasingly rare that any of the habitués of Caffè della Borsa would be prepared to lift themselves off their seats, cross the few intervening yards and then sit down beside Geo.
And that’s not to take into account the unease which rewarded those few for their willing efforts of sociability—each time they felt an anxiety flecked with annoyance which they were unable to shrug off for at least two or three days. Frankly, it wasn’t possible, they would exclaim, to keep a conversation going with someone dressed so ludicrously! And besides, letting him speak, they would continue, meant that, sure enough, he’d again start telling about Fossoli, Germany, Buchenwald, the fate of his whole family and so on, so that it was impossible to know how to extract themselves. At the cafe, under the awning pummelled by the sirocco blowing across, and as ill-protected as the tables, chairs and the figures reckless enough to sit at them were from the full violence of the afternoon sun, while Geo chattered away unstoppably, there was nothing else to do but follow, from the corner of their eyes, the movements of the builder opposite busy plastering over the holes in the Castle moat’s parapet from the bullets left by the execution by firing squad on December 15, 1943. And he, Geo, what was he recounting in the meantime? Without assuming that this was already understood, perhaps he was repeating once again, word for word, the phrases that his father murmured to him before fainting on the path back to the Lager from the salt-mine where both of them were working. Or else, raising his hand in exactly the same way as he had done a hundred times before, he demonstrated the little wave goodbye his mother had given him some twenty minutes after the train had stopped in arrival at the deserted ghostly station in the middle of a forest of fir-trees, as she was pushed away bewildered among a group of women. Or else, with the look of someone about to impart some important news, he again began to tell of Pietruccio, his younger brother, seated next to him in the complete darkness of the truck that was conveying them from the station to the barracks, and who suddenly disappeared without a complaint or a cry, for ever . . . Horrible, of course, devastating. Still, there was no need to be hoodwinked, those who’d survived such protracted and depressing encounters would declare—you could tell how forced and exaggerated, in short, how false, these stories of Geo’s were. And then what a bore! they would add, puffing. Such things had been heard so many times that to have them administered once again (and by the same person as well!) when the Castle clock up there was ringing out hour after hour, one was frankly inclined to give up the ghost and make a run for it. No, let’s be clear, you’d need more than a leather jacket and a fur cap to help you swallow this kind of stale swill.
During the remaining months of 1946, the whole of ’47 and a good part of ’48, this ever more ragged and desolate figure was unceasingly before the eyes of the whole of Ferrara. In the streets
, the squares, the cinemas, the theaters, around the sports fields, at public ceremonies: people would turn their heads and there he would be, indefatigable, always with that shadow of saddened bafflement in his eyes. To start holding forth—that was evidently his purpose. By now there was hardly anyone who didn’t keep him at bay, who didn’t flee him like the plague.
They continued to speak about him, that much, yes.
After Buchenwald, as could be heard in the nastier kind of gossip, it would make sense if he chose to stay at home or, if he went out, that he’d prefer to plod down the shadowy sidestreets like Via Mazzini, Via Vittoria, Via Vignatagliata and Via delle Volte, instead of the thoroughfares of the Corso Giovecca and Corso Roma. When he brought out his lugubrious deportee’s uniform again, never more wearing the fine olive-colored gabardine which Squarcia, undoubtedly the best tailor in the city, had cut to his exact measure, and then contrived to turn up wherever people were gathered to enjoy themselves or simply with the healthy desire to be together, what possible excuse could one find for such eccentric and offensive behavior?
From this perspective, they would continue, the scandal which happened at Club Doro in August 1946 (more than a year, it should be noted, after the end of the war), where, at its opening night Geo had the bright idea of turning up dressed in the same fashion, could stand as an apt example.
Nothing could be said against the place in itself. There was no other way to describe it than with a single word: magnificent. Conceived according to the most modern criteria, it was impossible to criticize, except for the fact that it had been constructed at about a hundred meters from the place where in 1944 the five members of the underground Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale had been executed by firing squad—this last detail without doubt rather unpleasant, as the young Bottecchiari, if one looked at the thing from his personal point of view, was perhaps not wrong to underline in the short, satirical article published by him in the Gazzetta del Po a couple of days after the opening. At any rate, only the mind of a madman like Geo could have conceived of an idea to sabotage a place which was so happy and convivial in that manner. What harm was there in it? If people now, as it would soon enough be clear, felt the need for a locale outside the walls, and somewhere no one would stop them enjoying themselves, somewhere that, immediately after leaving the cinema, it would be possible to go, not only to have a snack, but also to dance to the sound of the radio-gramophone among groups of friends and truck drivers in transit, to stay out even sometimes till dawn—well, didn’t people have the right to that? Deranged by the war, and anxious to help on its way the much predicted and wished-for reconstruction, society needed to let its hair down occasionally. Thanks be to God, life had begun again. And when it begins, as one knows, it doesn’t look back.
