The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  Immediately behind the funeral carriage, the authorities followed in several lines that filled the small space between the carriage itself and the undifferentiated crowd carrying flags and placards.

  These were Socialists, Communists, Catholics, Liberals, activists, Repubblicani-storici:‡ in short, the complete ex-directory of the last secret Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, reconstructed with all its members for the occasion. Added to and mixed in with this group, one noticed some other figures who were not, strictly speaking, political, such as the engineer Cohen, president of the Jewish community, and the newly nominated mayoress, Dr. Bettitoni.

  So, even if the honorable Mauro Bottecchiari, usually known in Ferrara as “the prince of our forum,” couldn’t call himself the city’s most representative political figure after the recent administrative elections had seen the crushing victory of the Communists, it was to him, to his uncombed, silver head of hair, to his high-colored, loyal, convivial face that everyone’s gaze first turned. It’s true that on the actual political plane, at this point, the honorable Bottecchiari signified pretty well nothing (“A reformist à la Turati!” people on the Communist side had begun to call him). But compared to the old lion, what an insipid figure the other members of the ex-directory of the final underground Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale cut! Apart from Dr. Herzen, the so-called prefect of the Liberation, recently emigrated to Palestine, no one else was missing. There was the lawyer Galassi-Tarabini of the Democratic Christian Party, who, worried to find himself there at a purely secular, civic funeral—and for this reason he swivelled every which way his washed-out blue eyes that seemed always about to fill with tears—walked beside Don Bedogni, of the Catholic Action Party, who, on the contrary, in a French beret and baggy trousers, even in these circumstances made an effort to display the consummate ease, the unprejudiced, modern suavity which, in the post-war period, made him one of the most renowned public figures of the entire Emilia Romagna. There was the engineer Sears, of the Partito d’Azione,§ who, as usual, walked a little apart from the others with his small hands clasped behind his back, and was smiling slightly to himself. There was the little group of Repubblicani-storici—the chemist Riccoboni, the tailor Squarcia, the dentist Canella—rather embarrassed, you could clearly see, but still willing to keep up with the times. And finally there was Alfio Mori, the federal Communist of Ferrara: small, dark, bespectacled, with the hint of a smile that revealed his big white upper canines, he advanced in quiet conversation with Nino Bottecchiari, the young, promising provincial secretary of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia.¶ And yet, walking stooped and meek, reduced in appearance to a little band of nobodies, over all of them the honorable Bottecchiari enjoyed the easiest of victories. Seeing him looming over them by a head and continuously turning about that same red, ireful face—before which even Sciagura, the notorious Sciagura,# sent to attack him on the crowded Corso Giovecca in the remote year of 1922, had been forced to beat an ignominious retreat—there was no doubt that he, the lawyer, the honorable Mauro Bottecchiari, was back again, if only for a day, the indisputable, acknowledged leader of Ferrara’s anti-Fascists. So nothing could be more natural, after the carriage had stopped beside the grave, and the arzdóre of the Po delta had slid out from it the zinc coffin of Clelia Trotti, than that it should be he, the honorable Bottecchiari, who should be the first to move toward the catafalque. The solemn transferral of the remains of Clelia Trotti, who had died three years before in the prison of Codigoro, during the German occupation, from the Codigoro graveyard to the Communal Cemetery of Ferrara, could not possibly have exempted him from the role of absolute eminence that was his due. It was his responsibility as Clelia Trotti’s oldest comrade in the Socialist struggle to open the series of commemorative speeches.

  “Comrades!” shouted the honorable Bottecchiari—a raucous, imperious cry which echoed far along under the cemetery’s porticoes.

  “Comrades,” he added in a lower tone, after a pause, as if he were preparing to go full tilt.

  He then began to speak, gesticulating. And his words would most certainly have reached the furthest corners of Piazza della Certosa—the face of the honorable gentleman had at once become purple with the effort—if at that very moment a motor scooter in Via Borso hadn’t revved up explosively: a Vespa, one of the first to be seen coursing about the city just after the end of the war. The silencer on the Vespa’s exhaust pipe was missing. Missing? More than that, the showy chrome metal contraption which stuck out below, on the left-hand side of the scooter, served the opposite purpose: not to suppress the motor’s chugging revs but to make them drier and more obstreperous, better suited to the restless adolescent hand that twitched continuously to unleash them.

  Interrupted in his oratorical flourish, the honorable Bottecchiari became silent. Contracting his white, bushy eyebrows, he directed his gaze toward the end of the square. He was short-sighted and, not seeing clearly, with a nervous gesture of his big hand that always trembled, took out a tiny pince-nez. The distant image of a young girl on a Vespa—who, having left Via Borsa but now slowing down, was riding along the portico arches of the cemetery behind the mass of persons in a semicircle—soon came into focus. Oh, it must be a very young girl, from a good family, the honorable Bottecchiari said, twisting his lips in a grimace of sadness. Who could she be, whose child? he added, with a reticent but irritated expression, as if he were going over in his mind all the names of the most well-off families of the city’s bourgeoisie, among whom the Bottecchiaris were also numbered, as if surveying one by one all those sturdy, tanned, teenage legs which at least two months of swimming at Rimini, Riccione and so on, had pared down—oh yes, the bourgeoisie, after the storm of the war has passed, quickly resume all their old habits! “What a lack of decency!” he preached at them, loudly: with the bitterness of one who feels wounded, misunderstood. “I wonder,” he added, pointing with outstretched hand at the very young scooterist, upright in her saddle down there, the slight, almost masculine torso clad in a black silk shirt and with a red ribbon in her hair, “I wonder if one can be much more disrespectful than that!” And the crowd, hundreds of scandalized faces, turned all together to make a hushing hiss.

  “Ssh!”

  The girl didn’t understand, or else didn’t care to. Although she had by now reached that part of the square she was heading for—the honorable Bottecchiari, who had seen her disappear behind a high barrier of people hoisted up on to the curb-posts around the churchyard the better to witness the ceremony, had waited in vain for her to reappear into the open further on—she not only didn’t feel inclined to turn off the engine, but instead, unabashed, every now and then kept up her game of sudden, clamorous revvings.

  “For God’s sake, get her to stop!” cried the honorable Bottecchiari in exasperation.

  “Ssh!” repeated an energetic chorus of the men who had climbed on to the curb-posts: necks that turned, eyes that from above could admonishingly survey a scene that he, Bottecchiari, even on tiptoe, was completely unable to observe. And yet, in the meantime, no one who wanted to put an end to that scandal was prepared to get down, and thereby risk losing their place!

  Seated on the stone border of the churchyard, in a good spot to see everything—the honorable Bottecchiari over there, waiting to be able to resume his eulogy, and here, two or three meters away from him, the girl on the Vespa whose blue eyes just in that moment caught his own—Bruno Lattes gave a start.

  He felt uneasy (what follows in this story will explain why) and lowered his head. When, after a few seconds he raised it again, the girl was already looking elsewhere. She was now staring, in a clearly ironic way, at a boy more or less her own age, as ashen-blond as herself and with the same hard, indifferent look in his bright blue irises. A tennis racket between his legs, and a white pullover tied by its sleeves around his neck, the boy was just in front of her, likewise seated on the churchyard border. The two, it was clear to Bruno Lattes, were going out together—and for that r
eason had arranged to meet here—in Piazza della Certosa, of course! But who was she, who were her parents? Bruno kept thinking, suddenly, spasmodically attracted to her, to the red ribbon that tied up the girl’s hair. Was it possible that the war, the years in which he had been a boy and she a child, had left not the tiniest trace on her? Was it possible that everywhere in Italy the adolescents were like this, as if, unaware of anything, they had been born teenagers from out of the pages of an illustrated American magazine?

  “I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour,” said the young tennis player, without giving any sign of meaning to get up.

  “And you’re complaining!” replied the girl.

  She nodded, with a little sneer at the square teeming with people.

  “Looks to me like you’ve found something to keep you happy.”

  “Ssh! Be quiet!” repeated for the third time the men perched on the posts.

  The boy assumed the hard look of a gangster from the movies. With a grin he pointed at the scooter.

  “Why not give that little twitchy hand of yours a rest?”

  “I’d prefer to go somewhere else,” the girl grumbled, though, in the meantime having got down from the saddle and switched off the motor, she had sat down beside her friend. “So what do you want to do? Stick around here?”

  “Before this coffin that carries the mortal remains of Clelia Trotti, of our unforgettable Clelia,” the honorable Bottecchiari had resumed in a tone of voice which foreshadowed the big tears which would soon begin to roll down his apoplectic cheeks, “comrades, friends, fellow citizens all, I cannot but immediately recall the past we have lived through together. If I’m not mistaken, we came to know each other, Clelia Trotti, and I who address you, in the April of 1904 . . .”

  Bruno Lattes slowly turned to look in the direction of the speaker. But once again he gave a start. The little man, dressed all in black, straight as a ramrod, who stood down there at the side of the honorable Bottecchiari—didn’t he know him? Could he be Cesare Rovigatti, the shoemaker of Piazza Santa Maria in Vado?

  How little time has passed, he thought to himself with regret, since he, after July 25, 1943, had left Ferrara in August for Rome, and then no more than a year after, for the United States of America! And yet how much had happened in such a short time!

  At the start of those last, atrocious three years, his parents, who never believed they would have to flee, never saw the need to provide themselves with false papers, were taken away by the Germans, and both their names now figured among the nearly two hundred others on the memorial tablet which the Jewish community had had fixed on the facade of the Temple in Via Mazzini. And he? He, on the contrary, had escaped from Ferrara. He got away at the right moment not to suffer the same fate as his mother and father, or alternatively not to have been shot by firing squad in the following December at the time of the Salò Republic, with the reward, apart from having saved his skin, of being by now on his way toward a tranquil, dignified university career: he was so far only a lecturer in Italian, rather than having tenure, but soon he’d be given a permanent post, which would result (after some months of waiting) in his acquiring the longed-for American citizenship . . .

  In short, the last three years seemed like a lifetime. And yet Rovigatti, thank God—Bruno Lattes continued thinking and, without being aware, nodded his head in the affirmative—didn’t seem to have aged at all; even his grizzled black hair had remained more or less the same. Likewise the honorable Bottecchiari and all the other Ferrarese anti-Fascists, today assembled in an official plenary for the funeral of Clelia Trotti, whom he had known personally and spent time with from 1939 on. None of them seemed to have aged, nor had Ferrara itself, which, apart from the wreckage caused by the war, which was being speedily repaired, had seemed to him from the first identical to the city of his childhood and adolescence. Although stripped of all its furnishings, even the house he had been born and brought up in had been restored to him intact, intact like an empty shell . . . Likewise for Rovigatti—perhaps especially for him!—it seemed as though time had passed in vain, or even come to a halt.

  There it all was, preserved in Piazza della Certosa, he concluded—the little, old provincial world he’d left behind. Almost like a wax replica: there it all was, exactly the same as itself. But Clelia Trotti?

  The last time he’d met her had coincidentally been here, in Piazza della Certosa, nearly in the same spot where her coffin now rested, the day before his departure. In his memory, during the following interminable forty months, Clelia had never changed.

  How he would have liked, now, to have found her, too, fixed in wax, motionless like a grotesque statuette that, torn between scorn and compassion, he could position as he pleased! With a smile, he would have told her: “See, wasn’t I telling the truth when I promised I’d return? And you were wrong not to believe me.”

  If only she hadn’t changed, had remained forever the same as he had seen her that last afternoon before he went away, before he cut the cord and saved himself. He would have asked this of her, if, in the meantime, she hadn’t died.

  2.

  IN THE late autumn of 1939, almost a year after the proclamation of the Racial Laws, when he decided to go in search of Clelia Trotti, Bruno Lattes still knew almost nothing about her. From what he had heard, she was a small, withered woman, nearly sixty, who didn’t take care of herself, with the look of a nun, who, if you passed her on the street, you wouldn’t even notice. On the other hand, who in Ferrara at that time could claim to know her personally, or even remember that she existed? Even the honorable Bottecchiari, despite having acted a bit in his youth, and at the beginning of his political career having directed with her the legendary Torch of the People—they’d even been lovers, according to the whispered gossip, at least until the First World War broke out—even he, at the outset, gave the impression of having completely lost touch with her.

  “Here he is, our young Lattes!” the honorable Bottecchiari had cried out from behind the imposing, Renaissance-style table that served him as a desk on the occasion that Bruno had gone to his office hoping to glean some information about the old school mistress. “Do come in! Come in!” he had added heartily, seeing him hesitating at the doorway. “How’s your father?”

  While saying so, he extended his powerful right hand by way of greeting and encouragement, half-rising from his comfy lawyer’s seat upholstered in red satin while looking him up and down with a satisfied expression. And yet, as soon as he heard the name of Trotti, he was ready to withdraw into a state of cautious reticence.

  “But yes . . . just a moment . . .” he replied, with obvious embarrassment, “someone, I can’t remember who, must have told me that she’s living . . . that’s she’s gone to stay in the Saraceno district . . . in Via Belfiore . . .”

  He then changed the subject to speak of other things: about the war, the Phoney War, the likelihood of Italy’s entering the war, or rather “of Mussolini” doing so, and about Hitler’s next possible “strikes.” “Oh yes,” could be read in his blue eyes, full of little red veins and lit with triumphant irony, “oh yes! For twenty years you’ve looked at me with suspicion, even you people have avoided and despised me as an anti-Fascist, as a subversive, an enemy to the regime, and now that your lovely regime is chucking you out, here you are, all penitent, with your ears flat and your tail between your legs!”

  He spoke of all kinds of other things, while never straying far from matters of international politics and that kind of commentary about things military which, by this stage, when the radio transmitted the daily news of the war halted at the Maginot Line, overflowed even at the Caffè della Borsa. At least on that occasion, Bruno thought, it was clear he didn’t want the conversation to stray from such territory. His tone of bland complicity shouldn’t mislead anyone who listened to think otherwise. As justification for this, the friendship that he, Bottecchiari, had always had with Bruno’s father, also a lawyer, since their long-ago schooldays—rather than friend
ship it might be better to call it professional consideration between middle-class and well-off colleagues—this tacit understanding had been maintained between the two of them, even after the March on Rome, even after the assassination of Matteotti, by the solemn and confidential greetings they would smilingly exchange in the Corso Giovecca from the distance of one sidewalk to the other . . . So much so that, later, at the end of their “pleasant pow-wow,” as the honorable gentleman had put it, it was a big surprise for Bruno that it was he, Bottecchiari, who, unprompted, just as they were saying their goodbyes, should have returned to the topic of Clelia Trotti.

  “If you manage to track her down, do send her my greetings,” he said with a cordial grin, patting Bruno on the back just as he was halfway to the door.

  And then, in a lower tone:

  “You don’t know Rovigatti, do you—Cesare Rovigatti, the shoemaker who has his workshop in Piazza Santa Maria in Vado, beside the church?”

  “We always go to him to get our shoes resoled!” The words escaped Bruno and he felt himself blushing. “Why do you ask?”

  “He’s someone who’ll be able to tell you where Signora Trotti is,” explained the honorable gentleman. “Go and find him. Ask him. But be careful—” he added (the crack of the frosted-glass door had closed so it was now merely a spyhole)—“be very careful as she’s under surveillance!”