by André Aciman
And finally he ought to meet up with Alfio Mori, the friend and in some ways the disciple of Antonio Gramsci—they’d got to know each other in prison—the person from whom it’s said that his comrade Ercoli, every time he secretly reenters the country from the Soviet Union, most willingly accepts advice. Mori was the most important of them all, and, as such, was most keenly under surveillance. He would always need to move with extreme prudence. For example, he might arrange a meeting, and Mori wouldn’t turn up. A second one, and Mori would be absent once again. Only on the fifth or the sixth appointment might he finally decide to appear. So it was indispensable to be armed with patience. And if he, Bruno, was prepared to be patient, he might indeed manage also to have a talk with Mori . . .
She talked on and on. The shadows of the steles and gravestones slowly lengthened on the grass, the field little by little shed its crowd of visitors, and some enamored couples moved off in the direction of the city walls.
That evening Bruno was stretched out, as was his habit, at the feet of Clelia Trotti. As he listened without much attention to what the teacher was saying, he noticed a tall, slim, blond boy leaning on the handlebars of his bicycle some twenty meters away.
His head immersed in the pink sheets of the sports pages, he looked as though he were waiting for someone. And there on cue, at the far end of the square, almost running to reach him, was a girl, she, too, blonde and very beautiful, who, while continuing to cross the open field, turned every three or four steps to look back toward Via Borso as if she feared she were being pursued.
But of course it wasn’t true. She was merely playacting.
Once she had reached her friend, she was the first, like a good actress, to slip down on to the grass, with the rapid, graceful movements of one hand arranging her pleated, white woolen dress around her legs. With the other hand she tugged affectionately at the boy, who had remained standing, to sit down beside her.
Soon the two of them were sitting close to each other, beside the bicycle with their backs turned. Their young heads were so close as to be touching. Suffused with the mild air, delighted by the light touching of their bodies, it seemed as though they had no need to speak. “Who are they? What are their names?” Bruno was wondering while the voice of Clelia Trotti sounded distantly in his ear, an incomprehensible hum. He couldn’t remember their names. He was quite sure, though, that they were both still at school, perhaps at the liceo classico, and that they both belonged to one of the city’s upper-middle-class families.
Ten or so minutes passed.
Suddenly Bruno saw the boy move. He got back to his feet, calmly picked up the bicycle and then grasped his friend by her wrist. Letting herself go heavy, she now laughed with a lazy flirtatiousness, leaning her whole neck back.
They began to move off in the direction of the walls, crossing the field on a diagonal.
“Why don’t we go down there too?” Bruno asked.
Stretching out his left arm, he pointed at the Mura degli Angeli still in full sunlight.
“But it’s late. I’m afraid we won’t have time,” Clelia Trotti, interrupted mid-sentence, replied. “You know I have to turn in along with the hens!”
“What will it matter just this once? We’ll be able to see a magnificent sunset.”
He had already stood up. He stretched out a hand to help her get up, and then they walked on.
The young couple were about fifty meters ahead of them. The boy was sitting on his bike, and every now and then, to keep his balance, he encircled his companion’s shoulders with his right arm. Bruno watched them with an insatiable interest. “Who are they? What are their names?” he kept muttering under his breath. They seemed to him more than beautiful—marvellous, incomparable. There they were: the champions, the prototypes of their race! he said to himself with hatred and a desperate love, half-closing his eyes. Their blood was better than his, their souls were finer than his. If he wasn’t mistaken, the girl’s hair was tied at the back with a red ribbon. The little light that remained seemed to concentrate itself on that ribbon.
Oh, to be them, to be one of them, despite everything!
“I did well to let you persuade me. From the top of the wall we’ll be able to enjoy a truly extraordinary sunset,” Clelia Trotti calmly observed.
Bruno turned round. So she had seen nothing. Yet again she’d noticed nothing at all. And now once more she’d continued with what she’d been saying. Talking as if to herself. As if pursuing her dream. Lost, as ever, in the unending, lonely ravings of a convict.
He shivered.
Perhaps one day she would understand who Bruno Lattes was, he thought, turning back to look before him. But that day, if it should ever arrive, was still surely a long way off.
* A local orchestra.
† See footnote on p. 41.
‡ A political party of the center, but anti-Fascist. For information about the Comitato, see footnote on p. 66.
§ The Action Party was a radical Socialist party formed in 1942 and dissolved in 1947. It adopted the name of Guiseppe Mazzini’s democratic party from nearly a century before.
¶ See footnote on p. 68.
# Sciagura/meaning “calamity” in Italian/is the nickname of Carlo Aretusi, a prominent member of Ferrara’s Fascist squad who reappears throughout The Novel of Ferrara and takes center stage in “A Night in ’43.”
** See the footnote about this organization on p. 78.
†† A Bologna newspaper that was founded in 1885, and was under Fascist control from 1923 to 1943.
‡‡ The Bollettino della Vittoria was the final address to the army and the nation issued by the chief of staff, General Armando Diaz, at the conclusion of the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, which ended the First World War in Italy.
§§ Benedetto Croce (1866– 1952) was an Italian thinker whose ideas had great importance for Bassani and whose voluminous work spanned politics, history, philosophy, aesthetics, and poetry. He was also an active politician, critical of the Fascist regime and the only non-Jewish figure to refuse to answer a Fascist questionnaire enquiring about the racial background of Italian intellectuals.
¶¶ An exceptional linguist, abducted to Germany in the Venlo Incident in 1939; actually a major but promoted during his long captivity to lieutenant colonel— thought to have disclosed secrets to the Nazis under interrogation.
## Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), an important Italian poet whose most famous work is Dei sepolcri.
A Night in ’43
1.
AT first you might not be aware of it. But once you’ve been seated for a few minutes at one of the small outside tables of the Caffè della Borsa, with the sheer crag of the clocktower before you and, a bit to the right, the crenellated terrace of the Orangery, the whole thing dawns on you. This is what happens. In summer as in winter, in rain or shine, it’s very unusual for whoever crosses that stretch of Corso Roma to prefer keeping to the opposite sidewalk that runs along the dark-brown back of the Castle moat. If anyone does so, then it’s sure to be a tourist, finger wedged between the pages of the Touring Guide and gaze tilted upward, or a traveling salesman who, with leather bag under his arm, is hurrying toward the station, or a farm worker from the Po delta come to the city for the market who, waiting to take the local afternoon bus back to Comacchio or Codigoro, with evident embarrassment lugs his body weighed down with the food and wine he consumed a little after midday in a dive in San Romano. In short, it could be anyone, except someone from Ferrara.
The visitor goes past, and the cafe regulars stare and grin. Yet, at certain hours of the day, those eyes stare in a strange way, even the breath is shorter. The boredom and laziness of the provinces might germinate all kinds of imaginary massacres. It’s as though the sidewalk stones opposite were about to be blown to bits by the explosion of a mine detonated by the unwary visitor’s foot. Or else as though a rapid burst of bullets from the Fascist machine gunner who, as it happened, fired precisely from here, from under the portico of the Caffè della
Borsa one night in December 1943,* murdering eleven citizens on that stretch of sidewalk, should make the incautious passer-by perform the same brief, ghastly jig, all startled twists and jumps, that in the moment of death the victims undoubtedly performed before falling lifeless one on top of the other—those whom History has for years consecrated as the very first victims of the Italian civil war.
Of course, none of this happens. No mine explodes, no machine gun returns to pepper the low wall opposite with bullet holes. And so this visitor who, let’s suppose, has come to Ferrara to admire its fine artistic heritage, can pass by in front of the little marble plaques bearing the engraved names of the executed persons without his thoughts being assailed by the least disturbance.
And yet, sometimes, something does happen.
One suddenly hears a voice. It isn’t a powerful voice, but rather a raw, cracked voice as boys have at the onset of puberty. And since it emerges from the puny chest of Pino Barilari, the owner of the adjoining pharmacy, who, at one of the windows of the apartment above, remains invisible to whomever is seated below, it really sounds as though it has descended from the heavens. The voice says “Beware, young man!” or “Careful!” or “Whoa there!” It’s not, I repeat, as though these words were yelled out. Rather, it sounds like a friendly warning, like advice given in the tone of someone who doesn’t expect to be listened to, nor, in the end, who has that much desire to be heard. So the tourist, or whoever else happens at that moment to be treading the sidewalk that every true Ferrarese avoids, usually continues on his way without giving any sign of having understood the warning.
But the customers of the Caffè della Borsa, as I’ve already said, understand it only too well.
As soon as the absent-minded outsider hoves into view, the hubbub of conversation is quelled. Eyes stare, the breath is held. Will that person, who has nearly arrived at the paving-stones where the shooting took place, realize that he’s about to do something he’d be much better leaving undone? Will he or will he not finally lift his head out of the Touring Guide? But above all, at a given moment, will the aerial and absurd, sad and ironic voice of the invisible Pino Barilari descend from above, or will it not? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Awaiting the outcome often has a quality of muscular contraction, no more or less than that which attends a sporting event whose result is especially uncertain.
“Whoa there!”
Suddenly, in everyone’s mind’s eye the image of the chemist at the upstairs apartment window materializes. So, this time, he’s there, seated at the windowsill, on the lookout, with his thin, hairy, very white arms raised to point at the passer-by who hasn’t noticed the glint of the field glasses above. Many of those hidden in the protective shadow of the portico experience vivid relief to be where they are, rather than out in the open, utterly exposed.
2.
IN 1939, a year that was so decisive for the fate of Italy and the rest of the world, there weren’t many people in Ferrara who could recount anything that wasn’t merely general about him or his life: about, that is, the man seated in pyjamas on an armchair with his back resting on two big white cushions, whose insistent presence at the window overlooking Corso Roma began to be noticed in the summer of that year.
That he was the only son of Dr. Francesco Barilari, who died in 1936 and bequeathed him one of the best pharmacies in the city, that, yes, was a fact known even to the children of the most recent generation. Many a time, as if weighing the future potential of each of them (for this they’d nicknamed him “Scales”), would the ironic, penetrating gaze of the meditative and bony chemist fall on these boys in the mornings as, running to school, they passed by the outdoor tables of the Caffè della Borsa while taking the last puffs on the most vestigial stubs of their cigarettes. There was little else to add about him other than that he had been a respected Mason of the 33rd degree who, in the early days, had had some sympathy for Fascism, and that from time immemorial he had been a widower.
The information about the young Barilari, if someone thirty-one years old can be called young, didn’t go much further than what has already been said. When, for example, in 1936, at the death of the old Mason, he was promptly seen to take up his post behind the counter of the pharmacy, the surprise had been general. Encased in his white coat, he served the customers with confidence, and let them call him “Doctor.” So he’d been to university and actually completed the course! they murmured, amazed. “But where? And when? Who had studied with him?”
There was new surprise and wonderment in the autumn of 1937, on the occasion of his sudden marriage to Anna Repetto, the blonde, seventeen-year-old daughter of a marshal in the Carabinieri, originally from Chiavari, but for some years stationed with his family in Ferrara.
She was quite a wild type, forever going on bike rides or to dances in the local clubs, and always followed, not only by long trains of her contemporaries, but also by the gaze of many older men who were admiring her development from afar. In short, she was a young woman who was very eye-catching and very much in the public eye, so that to have her whisked away from under their very noses by someone like Pino Barilari, all of them felt somewhat swindled, betrayed even.
And then, soon after the wedding, more heated gossip about Pino circulated, but much more, to tell the truth, about his very young bride.
Many had made the most feverish predictions about her. She would be noticed on a beach at the nearby Adriatic Riviera by some bigshot from somewhere exotic, who would fall in love at first sight, then marry her; a film director, also bewitched by her graces, would take her back to Rome to be a star . . . So how could they possibly forgive her for having given in to the temptation to settle down, and in that way? They accused her of pettiness, of petit-bourgeois greed, of innate whorishness. They even taxed her with ingratitude to her family. Oh yes. Ligurians, such moneygrubbers—who knows what disappointment they too had had to face, those poor souls! And then when on earth had those two seen each other before they were married? Where had they met up? If theirs hadn’t been one of those worthless affairs, common enough, conducted by telephone, they would surely have been caught every now and then in the vicinity of Piazza della Certosa, or along the city walls, or in Piazza d’Armi, and so on. So once again that sly operator Pino Barilari had acted with incredible flair. Hidden away in his pharmacy, he’d let the others, out there, wear themselves out in contemplation of Anna, who, with her blonde hair thrown back over her shoulders, with her generous lips all bright with lipstick, and, displaying her long, suntanned legs up to her thighs and even further, would parade back and forth in front of the little tables of the Caffè della Borsa. Then just at the right moment, snap, he’d pulled in his net, and tough luck to the rest of them. Besides, was there really any need for him to be seen about with a free and unconstrained girl like Anna Repetto—a girl the city never lost sight of for a moment—if above the pharmacy, after the death of his father, he had an entire apartment at his disposal? Who would ever have noticed if, say, she had discreetly entered the pharmacy at two in the afternoon, when no one would still be sitting under the awning of the Caffè della Borsa? A distasteful story, they concluded with a grimace, and decidedly vulgar. Since things ended as they did, better not to speak any more about it, better to just forget it.
Only the sudden paralysis that no more than two years later deprived Pino Barilari of the use of his legs had had the power once more to concentrate public attention on him. The result was to suspend him high up there, as in a royal box, a half-bust in pyjamas above the animated theater of Corso Roma. From then on, his young wife, though of course for a while commiserated with, was barely considered. The conversations turned back to Pino, and to him alone. But wasn’t it exactly this that he had sought, exhibiting himself as he did to the eyes of the world? And in fact he was always there now, seated from morning to evening at the window of the apartment above the pharmacy, and ready to glare at anyone who risked passing by within range along the sidewalk by the Castle moat, in a manner, as those same
passers-by claimed, that was both insolent and unabashed. And happy as well!—they would add—as though it were the syphilis itself, which for so many years had lain meekly slumbering in his blood, and had at last broken out to deprive him of his legs, that had transformed his colorless life into something clear, comprehensible to him, in short existent. Now he felt strong, one could see it, even reborn; however, now he was utterly different from that kind of shipwrecked figure grabbing on to a lifebelt who, soon after the marriage, had on two or three occasions toward evening been seen arm in arm with his wife along the Corso Giovecca. “You see, my dear fellows, what a small youthful indiscretion can lead to?” he’d had the air of saying. “This is what, can’t you see?” In his now shining eyes there was no shadow to be seen. Of any kind.
But fully to understand the embarrassment, the instinctive suspicion, that this sort of behavior induced in the townsfolk, it’s worth at this point dwelling on the sense of stupefaction, uncertainty and general diffidence which had begun to diffuse itself throughout Italy, but especially in Ferrara, from the start of the summer of 1939.
In the eyes of many good people the city had at a stroke transformed itself into a kind of hell.
To begin with, there was what happened with those upper-school pupils, which kept cropping up in conversation—that group of boys, none of them older than eighteen, who, prompted by their philosophy teacher, a certain Roccella (who fled to Switzerland) had arrived at the sterling plan of smashing the windows, one each night, of the most important shops in the city center, with the clear intent to foment panic and disorder among the population. This had meant that for the police to be able to lie in wait and catch the villains red-handed, their numbers had to be swollen by a score of old squad members, personally arranged into voluntary patrols by Carlo Aretusi, the renowned Fascist veteran who had joined up even before the March on Rome. Youthful high jinks they might have been, but regardless of the arrested boys’ spirited professions of communism, the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo† itself was involved in trying to downplay their political significance. Yet an element of that undoubtedly lingered. Things got worse, and that’s for sure. Defeatists, saboteurs and spies were lurking everywhere. That things were not going in the right direction could be read in the faces of certain Jews, for instance, who even then might be encountered in plain sight along Corso Roma, under the portico of the Caffè della Borsa—the whole lot of them ought to be shut up again in the ghettoes, and be done with the usual inappropriate pieties!—or it could be read in the faces of some of the city’s more fanatical anti-Fascists who would stop by the Caffè della Borsa only on occasions of public calamities, and these befell us almost every day: there they were, always there, just like other birds of ill-omen of a similar feather. Only the blind would be unaware of the malicious pleasure that, from under the habitual mask of indifference, issued from their every pore! Only the deaf would not have heard in the voice with which the honorable Bottecchiari, seated some way off, hailed the waiter Giovanni to order his usual aperitif—a strong, calm, crisply articulate voice, which made the customers on the other side of the place jump—the derision of someone already looking forward to and savoring their revenge! And what could it mean, that absurd mania to display himself that had seized hold of Pino Barilari, if not that, as an anti-Fascist, a subversive, he too wanted to expedite the defeat of the nation? In his open display of an unseemly disease, wasn’t it possible to descry a subtly offensive and provocative intent, beside which, even the fourteen shop windows left shattered from the stones thrown by the so-called “gang of pupils,” was footling child’s play?
