by André Aciman
When he was downstairs, hovering at the main entrance, the first thing Bruno did was look up at the faintly lit square face of the clock in the square. It was seven o’clock. Why not go at once to see Rovigatti? If he hurried, he could easily find him still there in his dark little den. He was the kind of person who never closed before eight, eight-thirty.
He waited for the most opportune moment to slip away without drawing any attention to himself. He finally stepped out, and having hurried across the open space in front, as always teeming with people at that hour, he took cover under the Duomo’s arches.
He began to walk more slowly now, his hands deep in his raincoat pockets, and at the same time he pondered the ambiguous welcome he’d received from Bottecchiari.
Once again he saw his face as it had last appeared through the half-closed door. He had said “Rovigatti” and given a wink as he spoke. So, what had he meant, the honorable Bottecchiari, with that meaningful wink? Had he wanted, with that rather vulgar sign and the whispered name, to excuse himself indirectly for having kept their whole conversation a bit on the general side? Or alternatively, had he wanted to hint at the bond that had tied him, and perhaps, who knows, still secretly did, to his old Party comrade, a hint which, it’s clear, would take away, even from the little that had been said, any political import? In fact this was consistent with the way he usually behaved in Ferrara, when half boastfully, half ashamed of himself, he would confide man to man (but above all to other middle-class persons!) of a relationship he was having with a working-class girl. Exactly in that manner, and from time immemorial. And yet, on the other hand, wasn’t it quite odd that the honorable Bottecchiari, an ex-deputy of the Socialist Party, a veteran anti-Fascist, one who gave the impression of never having kowtowed to anyone, should be prepared to adopt—it didn’t matter whether for a joke or flirtatiously—the same stupid and cruel sulkiness of the conformist herd which arrogantly occupied the streets, the cafes, the cinemas, the dance halls, the sports grounds, the barbers’ shops, even the brothels, excluding from the Imperium whoever was or seemed different? The truth was that not even the honorable Bottecchiari had escaped without being harmed, without his character, the fierce integrity of his youth, being tainted by the pressure of those decades, from 1915 to ’39, which had seen in Ferrara, as everywhere else in Italy, the progressive degeneration of every human value. It’s true, his fellow lawyers, all of them Fascist in the extreme, literally foamed with anger every time, holding forth in the courthouse, he made it clear what he thought—more than one, without doubt, would have liked to hurl him to the ground, grab him by the folds of his toga, and yell in his face, “You’re trying to insinuate such and such, eh? Admit it!” But in reality they’d always let him hold forth, content in the end to have given the old battler free rein once more to indulge his eternal saying-without-saying, his never-ending, tireless hinting, which over the years had become a kind of tic, an addiction, almost the expression of a second nature. If the honorable Bottecchiari, regardless of his past, was always prepared, when leaving his office or the court on his way home every day, to walk down Corso Giovecca defiantly flaunting his mane of almost luminously white hair in the face of his few friends and many enemies, none of this had happened without him too, at some level, having at least partly forgiven us.
Rapt in these thoughts that held his heart in the grip of anxiety, jostling and being jostled by passers-by, Bruno slowly ascended Via Mazzini and Via Saraceno. “How disgusting!” he hissed every now and then between his teeth. He looked with hatred at the sparkling shop windows, the people stopped in front of them to look at the goods on display, the shopkeepers that showed themselves in their doorways, more or less the same in their behavior, he thought to himself, as the shrews who kept watch, always half in, half out of their huddled little houses in Via Colomba, Via Sacca and thereabouts. Still ensnared and enslaved by the passion which, since the August of that year, had tied him to one of the most brilliant and sought-after girls in Ferrara, Adriana Trentini, the women that passed him going the other way and brushed against him without noticing him (the beautiful, the blonde and the elegant especially) seemed to him in their whole way of being at once adorable and detestable, to carry the ill-disguised mark of depravity. “What trash! What shameful scum!” he kept repeating, not even under his breath.
And yet, gradually as he proceeded, and the streets became narrower and less well-lit, his fury and disgust began to abate. Taking a left turn into Via Borgo di Sotto, he came out almost level with Via Belfiore and was about to cross. But from the closed blinds of the houses in Via Belfiore, at least as far as where the little street made a sharp bend, only a sparse, yellowish light filtered out. Who could he ask, whose doorbell could he ring? By now everyone would be eating supper—at his own home as well, they’d be expecting him. Remembering Rovigatti, he ended up going on.
Obscured by fog, the Piazza Santa Maria in Vado suddenly cleared before him, revealing the sombre facade of the church on one side, the dark opening of Via Scandiana in front, in the center the little fountain where a group of women were seated chattering, shabby little workshops and hovels all around, from which emanated, together with a faint light and smells of roast beef and chestnut cake, vague and various sounds: an anvil beaten weakly, a child’s muffled sobbing, a “goodnight” and a “goodbye” exchanged by two elderly men from deep under an invisible portico, a clinking of glasses . . . His gaze was quickly drawn to the left by a small, slightly better-lit window. Rovigatti was there, seated at his cobbler’s workbench. Beyond the steamed-up windowpane his familiar outline could be discerned. And as he made his way toward him, it was as though he stood still and the unchanged image of the shoemaker was coming toward him through the fog.
He went in, took off his hat, offered his hand to Rovigatti above the workbench, sat down in front of him and at once and without any difficulty obtained the full and exact address of the schoolmistress: 36, Via Fondo Banchetto, at the house of Codecà. Then they began to talk. So that evening, as well, when he returned home the supper had long been finished.
The very next day, he timidly rang the doorbell of 36, Via Fondo Banchetto. And certainly, if he had been invited in at once, if a fat woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a shy manner—“her sister” as Rovigatti had drily explained—hadn’t come to the door to tell him that the schoolmistress was not at home, if she, the same she, in a black satin smock and with the Fascist badge pinned to her breast, hadn’t reappeared the next day to tell him that the schoolmistress was giving lessons and therefore couldn’t receive any visitors, and the next day again, that she wasn’t well, and, yet another day, that she’d gone to Bologna and wouldn’t be back before next week, and so on week after week, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become, as he did in fact become, friends with Rovigatti. He had understood from the first moment that he would be kept waiting at Santa Maria in Vado. But for how long? he had wondered. Had Clelia Trotti come to know him through his attempts to contact her? Had her married sister Codecà told her that he came to the house almost every day?
Each time he pressed the bell his heart would be beating fast, and each time he felt the disappointment anew. Rejected, he would withdraw to Piazza Santa Maria in Vado, not three hundred meters away. He would never find Rovigatti’s glass door shut, on that he could rely. He only needed to push it open with two fingers, and there would always be the shoemaker in person, with his tuft of raven hair which still youthfully flopped over to one side of his pale forehead, stippled with blackheads around the temples, with his smile, with his dark, almost feverish eyes which gazed up at him. “Good evening, Signorino Bruno, how are you?” Rovigatti would say. “Do come in please and make yourself at home.” And did he not truly do so?
They would sometimes talk till after nine o’clock. In the meantime, seated on the bench facing him, Bruno would watch the shoemaker at work.
Rolling the pack thread in palms as tough as the leather he had cut out in the shape of a sole, Rovig
atti drew the needle back and forth with a measured energy. He perennially kept a handful of tacks in his mouth, and his lips and tongue were wonders of precision and promptness in disgorging them one by one into the light as the occasion required. Gripping a shoe tightly between his knees, he hammered the tacks in tirelessly and automatically . . . How skilled and assured he was! Bruno thought. What strength and self-awareness he seems able to derive from manual labor! Making busy with his big, blackened, incredibly calloused hands didn’t seem in the least to impede his conversation. Rather the opposite. A tack hammered home through the thickness of leather with a single stroke seemed sometimes to serve his purposes better than any argument.
And yet what was it that still kept them apart? he often asked himself. What stopped him from winning the shoemaker’s full and absolute confidence? Class difference, perhaps? Could it really be that?
Speaking ill of Fascism to him—in the end really an expedient to win him over, but mainly to get him to intervene on his behalf so that Clelia Trotti’s realm might open up to him a bit earlier than had been decreed—it sometimes happened that the shoemaker only listened, or replied coldly, in an exaggeratedly objective tone.
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” he went as far as replying one evening, having given a peep outside to check. “No, I wouldn’t say that. Even the Fascists have done some good.”
He was clearly relishing a victory. Not only because Signorino Bruno, the son of those well-off folk in Via Madama whose shoes he’d resoled for almost twenty years, had come to pay him visits, but also because a moment ago he had enjoyed the luxury of conceding some small merit to a common enemy. He wasn’t an upper-class gentleman, no, he seemed to be saying. He, Cesare Rovigatti, had been born and brought up among the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed. And so? Just because Cesare Rovigatti was only a shoemaker, did that now mean you could only expect from him obtuse rancor and blind, indiscriminate hatred? Ah no, that’s too easy! Those times were over when the rich and powerful could make use of the working classes as cannon fodder, reserving a monopoly on fine sentiments for themselves! Enough of these misunderstandings! If someone had fooled themselves into thinking they could start these old tricks again now, entrusting the working classes with the noble task of doing their dangerous work for them, well then so much the worse for that someone.
He seemed to much prefer other topics to politics. Literature, for example.
Did Bruno like Victor Hugo? he asked. What an unbeatable book, Ninety-Three! And Les Misérables? And The Man Who Laughs? And Toilers of the Sea? Although on a much lower level, only Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi in nineteenth-century Italy had managed to write a novel somewhat similar. And yet, all considered, what a disaster Italian literature was from the proletariat’s point of view, taking into account the level of education available to him in our country! Among the poets, who was there to look to except Dante, “the greatest poet in the world”? Those who came after had always written for the upper classes and not for the people. Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Alfieri—oh yes, even Alfieri!—Foscolo: all of them fashioning stuff for the élite. As for The Betrothed—too much odor of incense, of the reactionary! No, if you wanted to read something worthy—modest, perhaps, but worthy—you had to leap forward to the Carducci of “The Love Song” or some of the social satires of Stecchetti. But on this subject, now, in the twentieth century, apart from “that degenerate D’Annunzio,” apart from Pascoli, how were things faring in the world of literature? He, unfortunately, hadn’t the time to keep up. Closing at seven, the city library didn’t allow any worker in the evening to profit from that public service. But Signorino Bruno didn’t have the same constraints. Although, as a Jew, neither could he any longer frequent the city library, nevertheless he taught in the Jewish middle school in Via Vignatagliata and could consider himself a teacher. And so, educated as he was, and surely informed of all that’s new, did he, Signorino Bruno, believe that in Italy, today, there were still any good writers?
Suddenly gripped by a deep sense of futility, almost of impotence, Bruno kept silent.
“In that area, I’d be willing to bet,” Rovigatti concluded, shaking his head, “no one today’s doing anything good or useful!”
But what Rovigatti was most at ease talking about was his own craft.
His was a humble craft, he said, one of the humblest, even: about this no one could be more convinced than he was. But thanks to it, not only had he been able to make ends meet since he was a boy, but also it meant he’d never had to bow down to anyone through all the years of the dictatorship. And then did Signorino Bruno think that being a shoemaker didn’t provide him with interesting challenges? Any activity could provide those. You just need to exercise it with passion, succeed in winkling out its secrets.
He was speaking without the least bitterness at this point. And Bruno, listening to him, and bit by bit forgetting his own sadness, ended up feeling almost cheerful.
In his hands any misshapen and scuffed shoe always came alive. With infallible intuition, Rovigatti was able to reconstruct a character from the way a client had scuffed a toe, twisted an upper or worn down a heel.
“It’ll be hard getting this person to pay up,” he would say, for example, handling some shoes of the tightest patent leather, which seemed new and yet hid considerable signs of wear under their pointed toes. The caution with which he proffered them for Bruno’s inspection over the little workbench, for him to examine them with the interest they deserved, perfectly characterized their owner, who was Edelweiss Fegnagnani, no less, one of the most renowned “decadents” of the city.
“And you, blonde beauty, be careful where you run off to!” he murmured with a sympathetic grin, passing his calloused thumb around the extraordinarily high heel, sharp as a dagger, of a little crocodile-skin shoe which a brisk, exuberant, triumphant style of walking had thoroughly consumed at the edges.
One evening he even showed Bruno, among others, the shoes of the honorable Bottecchiari, “the prince of our forum,” as he put it, not without sarcasm.
“He has some flaws, you can see,” he added a moment later, his eyes burning with combative enthusiasm, with tenacious loyalty, “but he’s someone in whom, thank God, one can still have some faith. What does it matter if he’s become a bit bourgeois? He earns money, a great deal of it. He has a lovely house, a lovely wife . . . at least, lovely once, though fifty years will have taken a toll even on her . . . With his intelligence, his gifts as a speaker, even the Fascists respect him and court him. Last year they even wanted to give him a Party card. But you know what he said to them? He gave them a slap!”
Meanwhile his hands kept on turning over the honorable Bottecchiari’s footwear, a pair of brown leather shoes with square toes—the shoes of a hearty optimist, weighing more than a hundred kilos, at whose side he had marched in the ranks of the Italian Socialist Party of Giacomo Matteotti, of Filippo Turati and Anna Kuliscioff, and together with him, in 1924, had been attacked in the downstairs salon of the Railworkers Food Co-operative, both of them escaping by sheer miracle through a back door.
He gestured with his chin in the direction of Via Fondo Banchetto.
Neither he nor the other friends from the old days, he continued, still met up with the honorable Bottecchiari, hadn’t done so for almost twenty years, that was true. And yet, less than a week ago, seeing him passing the other way along the opposite sidewalk of the Corso Giovecca (the other side of the barricade! Bruno thought, suddenly swept up in a fellow feeling that bound him to Rovigatti, to Clelia Trotti, and to all the betrayed and forgotten poor of the city and of the country he imagined behind them, happy and grateful to be with them, now and forever . . .), less than a week ago, Rovigatti was saying, the honorable Bottecchiari, jovial and easy-going as ever, had shouted out, waving an arm above his head: “Ciao, Rovigatti!”
3.
ONE FINE day the door of the house in Via Fondo Banchetto opened without the usual stout figure of Signora Codecà appearing at the thresh
old. It had to happen. In any decent fairy tale (it could have been three-thirty in the afternoon: there was indeed something unreal about the silence of that utterly deserted district), it’s rare that things don’t come to an end with the disappearance or transformation of the Monster. At a stroke the spell was broken: Signora Codecà had vanished into thin air. And, well, who but Clelia Trotti could that person be who had opened the door in her stead? It must surely be her, Bruno told himself. It could only be her, the withered, neglected little woman, a kind of nun, as people had described her! To convince himself, all he needed to do was look her in the eyes. They were still the striking eyes of the free, passionate girl who had modelled herself on Anna Kuliscioff, of the impetuous working-class heroine that the honorable Bottecchiari had loved in his youth . . .
Having shed her dragon skin, and resumed her true features, Clelia Trotti, now, like the princess in a fairy tale, smiled sweetly at the young man who stood on the cobblestones outside her door, at his air of surprise and perplexity. At this point a “Come in—I know why you’re here,” would have been enough, and, as the little door closed behind them, shutting out the cottonwool-like hush of Via Fondo Banchetto, the fairy tale would have achieved its perfectly correct ending. But no, that welcome was not forthcoming. That sweet smile, somewhat disavowed by the clear expression in her sky-blue eyes, was merely questioning. It seemed to say “Who are you? And what do you want?” So much so that, at least this time, Bruno had little difficulty in understanding. It was clear, he thought. His name up till now had never been mentioned to Clelia Trotti, neither by Signora Codecà nor even by Rovigatti. It was necessary, then, across the threshold still denied to him, to declare his name and surname: “Bruno” and “Lattes,” syllable by syllable. This, in any case, was enough for the puzzlement that covered Trotti’s face—sincere puzzlement and a trusting abandon, while her pale eyes seemed washed in a wave of generous compassion—to give way to a clearer, more realistic perspective on the situation.
