by André Aciman
Deliliers looked at him as if he were a cockroach.
“Naturally,” he replied. “Are you worried I’ll ruin my face, Doctor?”
“Your face doesn’t concern me, although I can see it’s already quite marked with scars around the eyebrows. I feel duty-bound to warn you, though, that boxing, especially in the professional realm, in the long term ends up being deleterious to the organism. If I were in the Government, I’d have pugilism banned: even amateur fighting. Rather than a sport, I consider it a species of legal assassination. Pure organized brutality—”
“Oh, do me a favor!” Deliliers interrupted him. “Have you ever watched a fight?”
Fadigati was forced to confess he hadn’t. He said that, as a doctor, violence and blood horrified him.
“Well then, if you’ve never seen a fight,” Deliliers cut him short, “why are you talking about it? Who asked for your opinion?”
And once again, while Deliliers, almost shouting, hurled these words at the doctor, and then, turning his back on him, explained to us in a much calmer voice, that boxing, “the opposite of what certain idiots may think,” in essence is a sport of the legs, of timing and fencing, above all of fencing, once again I saw shining in Fadigati’s eyes the absurd but unmistakeable light of an interior joy.
Nino Bottecchiari was the only one among us who did not revere Deliliers. They weren’t friends, but they respected each other. In front of Nino, Deliliers considerably diluted his usual wise-guy antics, just as Nino, on his side, acted far less the professor.
One morning Nino and Bianca weren’t there—it was in June, if I remember right, during the exams. There were only six of us in the compartment, all men.
I had a bit of a sore throat, and was complaining of it. Recollecting that as a boy, while I was growing fast, he had had to treat me on various occasions for inflamed tonsils, Fadigati immediately offered to give me a “look-over.”
“Let’s see.”
He raised his glasses on to his forehead, took my head in his hands and began to examine my throat.
“Say aah!” he ordered, in his professional tone.
I complied. And he was still there examining my throat, and at the same time recommending in a friendly, paternal manner that I should take care not to get overheated and sweat, since my tonsils “although by now quite reduced in size” clearly remained my . . . “Achilles heel,” when Deliliers suddenly came out with:
“Excuse me, Doctor. When you’ve finished, I wonder if you’d give a little look at mine?”
Fadigati turned round: evidently much surprised by the request, and the gentle tone with which Deliliers had phrased it.
“What do you feel?” he asked. “Does it hurt to swallow?”
Dililiers stared at him with his blue eyes. He smiled, showing a glint of his incisors.
“It’s not my throat that’s bothering me at all,” he said.
“Well, what is it then?”
“Here,” said Deliliers, pointing at his own trousers at groin level.
He explained in a calm, indifferent manner, but not without a trace of pride, that he’d been suffering for about a month from the effects of a “gift from the little virgins of Via Bomporto—it’s no joke, I can tell you”—because of which he had had to give up work in the gym “as well.” Dr. Manfredini, he added, was treating it with blue meths and daily poultices of permanganate. But the treatment was taking too long, and he had to get fit as quickly as possible.
“My womenfolk are beginning to complain, as you can imagine . . . And so, would you mind taking a look at it as well?”
Fadigati had gone back to his seat.
“My dear fellow,” he stammered, “you know very well that with this kind of illness I have absolutely no expertise. And besides, Dr. Manfredini—”
“Don’t tell me that—you understand such things only too well!” grinned Deliliers.
“Not to mention that here on a train . . .” continued Fadigati, giving a frightened glance toward the corridor, “here on the train . . . how could it be done . . . ?”
“Oh, as for that,” replied Deliliers, ready for him, curling his lip in disdain, “there’s always the toilet, if you’d prefer.”
There was a moment of silence.
It was Fadigati who first broke into a loud laugh.
“You’re joking!” he cried out. “Do you never stop joking? You must take me for an idiot.”
This, leaning forward and slapping his knee.
“You ought to take care,” he said. “If not, one day or another you’ll come to a bad end!”
And Deliliers, in return, but with a serious tone:
“It’s you who should be worried about that.”
Some days afterward, at around six in the evening, we were all at Majano’s in Via Independenza. It was very hot. Nino was the one who first suggested going for an ice cream. If we didn’t buy them—he said—we’d soon, no, “immediately” have reason enough to regret it.
Even then, before the modernization of 1940, the Pasticceria Majano was one of the biggest pastry shops in Bologna. It consisted of an enormous, dimly lit hall, from whose high and shadowy ceiling hung a solitary, gigantic chandelier of Murano glass. It was rose-shaped, two or three meters in diameter. It was crowded with a vast quantity of little dusty light bulbs from which an extraordinarily dingy light filtered down.
No sooner had we entered than our eyes sought out at the end of the hall the source of the loud laughter we heard.
There must have been twenty or so boys there, most of them in navy-blue tracksuits: some sprawled in seats, some standing around, and each of them gripping an ice cream either in a cup or a cone. Meanwhile they were talking loudly, in the widest variety of accents: Bolognese, Romagnolo, Veneto, Marchigiano, Tuscan. At a glance, you could tell they belonged to that particular category of university students far more enamoured of sports stadia and swimming pools than of lecture halls and libraries.
Except for Deliliers, who immediately greeted us from the distance by raising his right arm in a friendly wave. To begin with we couldn’t make out among the company anyone else that we recognized, but after a few moments, when we’d grown used to the dim light, we discerned, half hidden within the group, an older gentleman sitting next to Deliliers with his back turned to the entrance. He was there, wearing his hat, his hands linked over the handle of his cane, without eating anything. He was just waiting. Like a tender-hearted father who had agreed to pay for ice creams for a noisy herd of sons and nephews, and who waits in silence, a little ashamed of himself, until the darling kids have finished licking and sucking to their hearts’ content, to ferry them all home . . .
That gentleman was obviously Fadigati.
8.
THAT SUMMER too, we went on our holidays to Riccione on the nearby Adriatic coast. Every year the same thing happened. My father, having vainly tried to entice us up into the mountains, the Dolomites, to see the places where he had fought in the war, in the end resigned himself to another trip to Riccione, renting the same little villa next to the Grand Hôtel. I remember it all perfectly. My mother, Fanny, our younger sister and I left Ferrara on the 10th of August, accompanied by our maid—Ernesto, my brother, had been in England since mid-July staying with a family in Bath to improve his English. As for my father, who had stayed in town, he was going to join us later: as soon as his duties administering the land at Masi Torello allowed him to leave.
The same day we arrived we immediately heard about Fadigati and Deliliers. On the beach, even then crowded with Ferraresi on their family holidays, they spoke of nothing else but them and their “scandalous friendship.”
Starting from the first days of August, in fact, the two had been seen moving from one hotel to another in the various seaside towns between Porto Corsini and the Punta di Pesaro. They had appeared first of all in the Milano Marittima, beyond the dockland canal of Cervia, having rented a lovely room in the Hôtel Mare e Pineta. After a week, they had moved to Cesenatico,
to the Hôtel Britannia. And then, inspiring fierce indignation and endless rumors everywhere, they gradually progressed to Viserba, Rimini, Riccione itself and Cattolica. They travelled by car: a red two-seater Alfa Romeo 1750 of the Mille Miglia type.
Around the 20th of August, apparently without a care in the world, there they were once more in Riccione, set up in the Grand Hôtel as they had been some ten days earlier.
The Alfa Romeo was brand new. Its engine gave a kind of growl. As well as for traveling, the two friends also employed it for the passeggiata every evening, when, at sunset, the crowd of bathers returned from the strip of sand to saunter along the promenade. Deliliers always drove. Blond, tanned, beautiful in his tight-fitting T-shirts and cream-colored woolen trousers (his hands, negligently draped over the steering wheel, were adorned with fretted, shammy-leather gloves about whose cost no one could harbor any doubts)—clearly it was only to him, to his exclusive whims, that the car responded. The other did nothing.
Wearing passenger goggles (he was never separated from them, not even when the automobile, cutting through the crowd with some difficulty, had to idle along a stretch of the avenue outside Cafe Zanarini at a walking pace), he would let himself be chauffeured up and down, seated complacently next to his companion.
They continued to sleep in the same room, to eat at the same table.
And they sat at the same little table even in the evenings, when the Grand Hôtel’s orchestra, having had their instruments transported from the ground-floor dining hall to the terrace exposed to the sea breeze, moved on from strains of light music to modern and jazz numbers. Soon the terrace would fill up—often enough I even went there myself with friends I had met on the beach—and Deliliers would never miss a single tango, waltz, two-step, nor a “slow” dance. Of course, Fadigati never danced. Every now and then taking to his lips the straw tilted above the rim of the glass, with his round eyes he never stopped following the suave moves that his distant friend accomplished, his arms always embracing the most elegant, the most conspicuous girls and women. Returning from their drives, both of them would immediately go up to their room to don their smoking jackets. Sober, heavy black material, Fadigati’s; Deliliers’s a white jacket, close fitting and cut short at the sides.
Life at the beach they also shared together: except that in the morning it was usually Fadigati who left the hotel first.
He would arrive when there was almost nobody else around, between eight thirty and nine o’clock, respectfully greeted by the bathing attendants, to whom, by their own account, he was always very generous with tips. Dressed from head to toe in normal city clothes (only later, when the heat increased, would he decide to shed his tie and shoes, but never his white panama hat, with its brim lowered over his eyes—that he kept on), he would go to sit under the solitary beach umbrella which he had asked to be planted farther forward than all the rest, just a few yards from the shore. Stretched out on a reclining deckchair, his hands linked behind his neck and a detective story open on his knee, he would remain like that for a good two hours, staring at the sea.
Deliliers never joined him before eleven o’clock. With his svelte stride of a lazy animal, made still more elegant by the slight impediment of clogs, there he would be, crossing without hurry the clearing of burning sand between the beach huts and the bathing tents. He, by contrast, would be almost naked. The white bathing trunks which he was just at that moment finishing lacing up on his left hip and the same gold chain which he always wore round his neck, and from which dangled a pendant of the Madonna at the top of his chest, somehow only served to accentuate his nakedness. And though, especially the first few days, it seemed to cost him some effort to greet even me when he saw me there in the shade of our tent; and though passing through the narrow passage between the tents and the umbrellas he never failed to furrow his brow in a show of annoyance, there was no real reason to take this performance seriously. It was clear he felt himself admired by most of those present, by the men as well as the women, and this was a source of considerable pleasure to him.
Without doubt everyone admired him, men and women alike. But it fell to Fadigati to pay for the indulgence that the Ferrarese sector of the beach at Riccione reserved for Deliliers.
Our beach-tent neighbor that year was Signora Lavezzoli, the wife of the lawyer. Having lost her former status, she is now just an old woman. But then, in the ripe splendor of her forty years, surrounded by the unstinting deference of her three adolescent children, two boys and a girl, and that, equally unstinting, of her worthy consort, the illustrious civil lawyer, university professor and ex-deputy in the Salandra camp,# she was considered one of the principal and most authoritative fonts of the city’s public opinion.
Pointing her lorgnette toward the beach umbrella under which Deliliers had come to rest, Signora Lavezzoli, who had been born and raised in Pisa, “on the banks of the Arno,” and made use of the exceptional skill of her quick Tuscan tongue, kept us continually abreast of everything that was happening “over there.”
With the technique, almost, of a radio sports commentator, she would note for example that “the newly-weds,” having just got up from their deckchairs, were wending their way toward the nearest pleasure boat: clearly the young man had expressed the desire to dive into the open sea, and “Signor Dottore,” so as not to remain on his own, “in the throes of anxious passion,” awaiting his return, had received permission to accompany him. Or else she described and commented on the freestyle gymnastic exercises that Deliliers, after his swim, would execute on his own, to dry himself, while “the beloved,” immobile there beside him with a towel in hand, would only too willingly have offered to do the drying himself, the rubbing down, the touching . . .
Oh, that Deliliers—she would then add, always speaking from tent to tent, but directing her speech to my mother in particular—perhaps believing that she was lowering her voice in such a way that the “children” would not be able to hear her, though actually speaking louder than ever—that Deliliers was just a spoiled boy, a “young good-for-nothing” for whom military service might prove more than useful. But not Dr. Fadigati. For a gentleman of his standing, of his age, there was really no excuse. He was “that way”? So what—live with it! Who’d been that bothered about it anyway, until now? But to put on such an exhibition, especially here at Riccione, where he could not pretend he wasn’t known, to make such a spectacle of himself; especially here when, had it been his desire, Italy could have furnished him with thousands of beaches where there’d be no danger of bumping into someone from Ferrara. Not a bit of it. Only from “a dirty old man” (and so saying, Signora Lavezzoli shot forth flames of real indignation from her queenly blue eyes), only from an “old degenerate” like him could one expect behavior of this sort.
Signora Lavezzoli talked on, and I would have given much if just once she could have kept quiet. I felt she was being unfair. Fadigati, it’s true, annoyed me, but it was not by him that I found myself offended. I knew Deliliers’s character perfectly. In that choice of the Romagnolo beaches, so close to Ferrara, all his malice and arrogance could be seen. Fadigati was irrelevant, I was quite certain. He was ashamed before me. If he failed to greet me, or even pretended not to see me, it was for that reason.
In contrast to the lawyer Lavezzoli, who came to the seaside the first days of August, and so along with the others was au courant regarding the scandal (inside the tent, however, while his wife held forth, he never stopped reading Antonio Adverse,** nor was ever heard to intervene), my father arrived in Riccione only on the morning of the 25th, a Saturday, even later than expected, and was obviously in the dark about the whole affair.
He almost immediately went up to greet Fadigati. Before my mother or the Lavezzoli family could hold him back, he was happily making his way toward him.
Fadigati winced, and turned away. My father had already stretched out his hand as the doctor was still trying to raise himself up from the reclining deckchair.
At last he ma
naged to. After which, for at least five minutes, we watched them talk, standing up under the beach umbrella with their backs turned to us.
They were both watching the motionless strip of sea, smooth, palely luminous, without the crimp of a wave. And my father, in whose whole person could be seen the joy of having “closed up shop”—the expression he would use at Riccione to refer to all the unpleasant things left behind in town: business, empty house, summer heat, melancholy lunches at the Roveraro, mosquitoes, and so on—with raised arm was pointing out to Fadigati the hundreds of pleasure boats scattered at various distances from the shore, and then very far away, barely visible on the horizon, almost suspended in mid-air, the rust-colored sails of the fishing-trawlers and the smaller fishing-boats.††
Finally they came toward our tent. Fadigati was letting my father lead the way by about a yard, and his face contorted into an odd expression, somewhere between beseeching, distaste and guilt. It must have been eleven o’clock, and Deliliers had not yet made his appearance. While I got up to go toward them, I noticed the doctor threw a rapid glance full of disquiet toward the line of beach huts, from which at any moment he expected, or feared, to see his companion emerge.
9.
HE KISSED my mother’s hand.
“You know the lawyer Signor Lavezzoli, don’t you?” my father immediately said, in a loud voice.
Fadigati hesitated for a moment. He looked at my father, nodding his head affirmatively; then, in intense discomfort, he turned toward the Lavezzoli tent.
The lawyer appeared more than ever absorbed in his reading of Antonio Adverse. The three “children” were stretched out face down on the sand a couple of steps away, in a circle around a blue bathing towel, taking the sun on their backs, motionless as lizards. The signora was embroidering a tablecloth, which draped itself in long folds down from her knees. She looked like a Renaissance Madonna on a throne of clouds.
Well known for his naive spontaneity, my father was utterly unaware of the so-called “situation” until he found himself waist-deep in it.
