by André Aciman
My father’s joy—I was thinking—was that of a little schoolboy unjustly thrown out of class, who, at his master’s call, returns from the empty corridor where he had had to remain a short stretch in exile, and finds himself suddenly, beyond all his hopes, permitted back into the classroom: not only absolved, but declared innocent and fully rehabilitated. And yet, in the end, was it not right for my father to rejoice just like that child? As for myself, I felt no such joy. The sense of solitude that during the last two months had never left me, at that very moment became, if that were possible, even more acute: absolute and definitive. From my exile, I would never return. Never.
I lifted my head. Elisa had left, the kitchen door was again properly closed. But still my father remained silent, or almost so. Bent over his plate, he confined himself every now and then to exchanging some pointless remarks with my mother, who smiled at him with gratification. Long shafts of early-afternoon sunshine transfixed the gloom of the breakfast room. They shone through from the adjoining drawing room, which was overflowing with light. When he had finished eating, my father would retire there to sleep, stretched out on the leather sofa. I could just see him there—set apart, enclosed, protected. As though in a luminous pink cocoon. With his ingenuous face offered up to the light, as he slept wrapped in his cape . . .
I went back to my newspaper.
And there, at the bottom of the left-hand page, opposite the sports reports, my eyes fell on a middling-sized headline.
It read:
WELL-KNOWN FERRARESE PROFESSIONAL:
DROWNED IN THE WATERS OF THE PO
NEAR PONTELAGOSCURO
I believe that for a moment or two my heart stopped. And yet I had not understood; it still hadn’t got through to me.
I took a deep breath. And then I understood, yes, I had already understood before I began to read the little half-column beneath the headline, which did not at all speak of suicide, it should be understood, but, according to the style of the times, only of misfortune (it was not acceptable for anyone, in those days, to kill themselves: not even for the long dishonored, who had no reason whatsoever to remain on the earth . . .).
I did not finish reading it, however. I lowered my eyelids. My heart had begun again to beat regularly. I waited for Elisa, who had reappeared for a moment, to leave us alone once more, and then said in a lowered but abrupt tone:
“Dr. Fadigati is dead.”
* SPAL (Società Polisportiva Ars et Labor): the principal Ferrara soccer club.
† GUF (Gruppi Universitari Fascisti): an organization that enrolled Fascists among university students as a kind of ideological elite.
‡ An Italian game played on a pocketless billiards table with nine balls, using hands instead of cues.
§ Italian cultural, artistic and sporting events organized by the National Fascist Party and the GUF between 1932 and 1940.
¶ Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) was also a philosopher, who had an early association with Croce. He became the Minister for Public Education under Mussolini and ghost-wrote the latter’s essay “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932).
# Antonio Salandra (1853–1931) was an Italian politician who as prime minister took Italy into the First World War, despite a parliamentary majority in favor of neutrality, and who later supported Mussolini.
** Anthony Adverse is a very long American novel by Hervey Allen published in 1933, which the lawyer is reading in translation. It was made into a film in 1936.
†† Bassani refers to “paranze” and “bragozzi”: the first, one-mast trawlers with sails, the second, smaller two-mast vessels restricted to the Adriatic.
‡‡ “l’azzurra visïon di San Marino”: a line from “Romagna,” a poem by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912).
§§ Rachele Guidi (“la donna Rachele”) married Mussolini in 1915, and remained with him despite his various mistresses.
¶¶ Ferrara dialect: “Poor thing.”
## Ferrarese dialect: “Get lost, you idiot!
*** The first line of The Iliad: “Sing, Goddess, of rage, of Achilles’ rage.”
††† Warm southwest wind, whose regional name “garbino,” or “garbin,” is elsewhere called the “libeccio.”
‡‡‡ A three-volume work, published between 1878 and 1889, by the Italian poet and Nobel Prize–winner Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907).
§§§ Ferrarese dialect: “What a fool.”
¶¶¶ Ferrarese dialect for scorn or dismissiveness that echoes the Fascist political term for “defeatism.”
### The exit from Sunday Mass was, at least until recently, a social event in Italian towns not unlike the evening “passeggiata,” though usually, as here, a chance more specifically for men and boys to eye the women leaving church.
**** A quote from Catullus (Carmina 3): “illud, unde negant redire quemquam” (“to the place from whence they say no one returns”).
†††† In the context, the Italian proverb that Fadigati uses—“Chi vivrà vedrà” (“Who lives will see”)—is slightly more ominous.
‡‡‡‡ The Palazzo del Viminale in Rome has housed the Italian Ministry of Home Affairs since 1925.
§§§§ Telesio Interlandi and Giovanni Preziosi were two of the foremost racist and anti-Semitic ideologues of the Fascist regime.
: III :
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Prologue
FOR many years I have wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis—about Micòl and Alberto, Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga—and about the many others who lived at, or like me frequented, the house in Corso Ercole I d’Este, Ferrara, just before the last war broke out. But the impulse, the prompt, really to do so only occurred for me a year ago, one April Sunday in 1957.
It was during one of our usual weekend outings. Ten or so friends piled into a couple of cars, and we set out along the Aurelia soon after lunch without any clear destination. A few kilometers from Santa Marinella, intrigued by the towers of a medieval castle which suddenly appeared on our left, we had turned into a narrow unpaved track, and ended up walking in single file, stretched out along the desolate sandy plain at the foot of the fortress—this last, when considered close up, was far less medieval than it had promised to be from the distance, when from the motorway we had made out its profile against the light and against the blue, blazing desert of the Tyrrhenian sea. Battered by the head-on wind, and deafened by the noise of the withdrawing tide, and without even being able to visit the castle’s interior, as we had come without the written permit granted by some Roman bank or other, we felt deeply discontented and annoyed with ourselves for having wanted to leave Rome on such a day, which now on the seashore proved little less than wintry in its inclemency.
We walked up and down for some twenty minutes, following the curve of the bay. The only person of the group who seemed at all joyful was a little nine-year-old girl, daughter of the young couple in whose car I’d been driven. Electrified by the wind, the sea, the crazy swirls of sand, Giannina was giving vent to her happy expansive nature. Although her mother had tried to forbid it, she had rid herself of shoes and socks. She rushed into the waves that beat on the shore, and let them splash her legs above the knee. In short, she seemed to be having a great time—so much so that, a bit later, back in the car, I saw a shadow of pure regret pass over her vivid black eyes that shone above her tender, heated little cheeks.
Having reached the Aurelia again, after a short while we caught sight of the fork in the road that led to Cerveteri. Since it had been decided we should return immediately to Rome, I had no doubt that we would keep straight on. But instead of doing so, our car slowed down more than was required, and Giannina’s father stuck his hand out of the window, signaling to the second car, about twenty-five meters behind, that he intended to turn left. He had changed his mind.
So we found ourselves taking the smooth narrow asphalted street which in no time leads to a small huddle of mainly recent houses, and from there winds on farther toward the hills of the hinterland up to t
he famous Etruscan necropolis. No one asked for any explanations, and I too remained silent.
Beyond the village the street, in gentle ascent, forced the car to slow down. We then passed close by the burial mounds which have been scattered across that whole stretch of Lazian territory north of Rome, but more in those parts toward the hills than toward the sea, a stretch which is, therefore, nothing but an immense, almost uninterrupted cemetery. Here the grass is greener, thicker and darker colored than that of the plain below, between the Aurelia and the Tyrrhenian sea—as proof that the eternal sirocco, which blows from across the sea, arrives up here having shed en route a great part of its salty freight, and that the damp air of the not too far-off mountains begins to exercise its beneficent influence on the vegetation.
“Where are we going?” asked Giannina.
Husband and wife were sitting in the front seat with the child in between them. Her father took his hand off the wheel and let it rest on his daughter’s dark-brown curls.
“We’re going to have a look at some tombs which are more than four or five thousand years old,” he replied, with the tone of someone who is about to tell a fairy tale, and so doesn’t mind exaggerating as far as numbers go. “The Etruscan tombs.”
“How sad,” Giannina sighed, leaning her neck on the back of the seat.
“Why sad? Haven’t they taught you who the Etruscans were at school?”
“In the history book, the Etruscans are at the beginning, next to the Egyptians and the Jews. But, Papa, who d’you think were the oldest, the Etruscans or the Jews?”
Her father burst out laughing.
“Try asking that gentleman,” he said, signaling toward me with his thumb.
Giannina turned round. With her mouth hidden behind the back of the seat, severe and full of diffidence, she cast a quick glance at me. I waited for her to repeat the question. But no word escaped her. She quickly turned round again and stared in front of her.
Descending the street, always at a slight gradient and flanked by a double row of cypresses, we came upon a group of country folk, lads and lasses. It was the Sunday passeggiata. With linked arms, some of the girls at times made exclusively female chains of five or six. How strange they look, I said to myself. At the moment we passed them, they peered through the windows with their laughing eyes, in which curiosity was mingled with a bizarre pride, a barely concealed disdain. How strange they looked, how beautiful and free.
“Papa,” Giannina asked once again, “why are old tombs less sad than new ones?”
A yet more numerous brigade than those that had passed us earlier, which took up almost the whole thoroughfare, and sang in chorus without thinking of giving way, had almost brought the car to a halt. Her father put the car into second gear as he thought about this.
“Well,” he replied, “the recent dead are closer to us, and so it makes sense that we care more about them. The Etruscans, they’ve been dead such a long time”—once again he lapsed into the fairy-tale voice—“it’s as though they’d never lived, as though they were always dead.”
Another pause, this time a longer one. At the end of which—we were already very close to the widened space in front of the necropolis’s entrance packed with cars and mopeds—it was Giannina’s turn to become the teacher.
“But now that you say that,” she gently put it, “it makes me think the opposite, that the Etruscans really did live, and that I care about them just as much as about the others.”
The whole visit to the necropolis that followed was infused by the extraordinary tenderness of this remark. It had been Giannina who had helped us understand. It was she, the youngest, who in some way led us all by the hand.
We went down into the most important tomb, the one reserved for the noble Matuta family: a low underground living room which accommodated a score of funeral beds disposed within the same number of niches carved in the tufa walls, and densely adorned with painted murals that portrayed the dear departed, everyday objects from their lives, hoes, rakes, axes, scissors, spades, knives, bows, arrows, even hunting dogs and marsh birds. And in the meantime, having willingly discarded any vestige of historical scruple, I was trying to figure out exactly what the assiduous visits to their suburban cemetery might have meant to the late Etruscans of Cerveteri, the Etruscans of the era after the Roman conquest.
Just as, still today, in small Italian provincial towns, the cemetery gate is the obligatory terminus of every evening passeggiata, they came from the inhabited vicinity almost always on foot—I imagined—gathered in groups of relatives and blood kindred, or just of friends, perhaps in brigades of youths similar to those we had met head-on in the street before, or else in pairs, lovers, or even alone, to wander among the conical tombs, hulking and solid as the bunkers German soldiers vainly scattered about Europe during the last war, tombs which certainly resembled, from outside as much as from within, the fortress dwellings of the living. Yes, everything was changing—they must have told themselves that as they walked along the paved way which crossed the cemetery from one end to the other, the center of which, over centuries of wear, had been gradually incised by the iron wheel-rims of their vehicles, leaving two deep parallel grooves. The world was not as it once was, when Etruria, with its confederation of free, aristocratic city-states, dominated almost the entire Italic peninsula. New civilizations, cruder and less aristocratic, but also stronger and more warlike, by this stage held the field. But in the end, what did it matter?
Once across the cemetery’s threshold, where each of them owned a second home, and inside it the already prepared bed-like structure on which, soon enough, they would be laid alongside their forefathers, eternity did not perhaps appear to be such an illusion, a fable, a hieratic promise. The future could overturn the world as it pleased. There, all the same, in the narrow haven devoted to the family dead, in the heart of those tombs where, alongside the bodies, great care had also been taken to furnish many of the things that made life beautiful and desirable; in that corner of the world, so well defended, adorned, privileged, at least there (and one could still sense their idea, their madness, after twenty-five centuries, among the conical tombs covered with wild grass), there at least nothing could ever change.
When we left it was dark.
From Cerveteri to Rome is not that far; normally an hour by car would be enough. That evening, however, the journey was not so short. Halfway, the Aurelia began to be jammed with cars coming from Ladispoli and from Fregene. We had to proceed almost at a walking pace.
But once again, in the quiet and torpor (even Giannina had fallen asleep), I went over in my memory the years of my early youth, both in Ferrara and in the Jewish cemetery at the end of Via Montebello. I saw once more the large fields scattered with trees, the gravestones and trunks of columns bunched up more densely along the surrounding and dividing walls, and as if again before my eyes, the monumental tomb of the Finzi-Continis. True, it was an ugly tomb—as I’d always heard it described from my earliest childhood—but never less than imposing, and full of significance if for no other reason than the prestige of the family itself.
And my heartstrings tightened as never before at the thought that in that tomb, established, it seemed, to guarantee the perpetual repose of its first occupant—of him, and his descendants—only one, of all the Finzi-Continis I had known and loved, had actually achieved this repose. Only Alberto had been buried there, the oldest, who died in 1942 of a lymphogranuloma, while Micòl, the daughter, born second, and their father Ermanno, and their mother Signora Olga, and Signora Regina, her ancient paralytic mother, were all deported to Germany in the autumn of 1943, and no one knows whether they have any grave at all.
I
• 1 •
THE tomb was huge, solid and truly imposing, a kind of temple, something of a cross between the antique and the oriental, such as might be encountered in those stage-sets of Aida or Nabucco very much in vogue at our theaters only a few years back. In any other cemetery, including the neighboring mu
nicipal cemetery, a grave of such pretensions would not have provoked the slightest wonder, might even, mixed in among the rest, have gone unheeded. But in ours it stood out alone. And so, although it loomed some way from the entrance gate, at the end of an abandoned field where for more than half a century no one had been buried, it made an eye-catching show of itself.
It seems that a distinguished professor of architecture—responsible for many other eyesores in the city—had been commissioned to construct it by Moisè Finzi-Contini, Alberto and Micòl’s paternal great-grandfather, who died in 1863, shortly after the annexation of the Papal States’ territories to the Kingdom of Italy, and the resulting abolition of the Jewish ghettos, in Ferrara as well. A big landowner, “Reformer of Ferrarese Agriculture”—as could be read on the plaque, eternalizing his merits as “an Italian and a Jew,” that the Community had had set above the third landing on the staircase of the Temple in Via Mazzini—but clearly a man of dubious artistic taste: once he’d decided to establish a tomb sibi et suis he’d have let the architect do as he liked. Those were fine and flourishing years—everything seemed to favor hope, liberality and daring. Overwhelmed by the euphoria of civic equality that had been granted, the same that in his youth, at the time of the Cisalpine Republic, had made it possible for him to acquire his first thousand hectares of reclaimed land, it was easy to understand how this rigid patriarch had been induced, in such solemn circumstances, to spare no expense. It is likely that the distinguished professor of architecture was given a completely free hand. And with all that marble at his disposal—white Carrara, flesh-pink marble from Verona, black-speckled grey marble, yellow marble, blue marble, pale green marble—the man had, in his turn, obviously lost his head.
What resulted was an extraordinary mishmash into which flowed the architectonic echoes of Theodoric’s mausoleum at Ravenna, of the Egyptian temples at Luxor, of Roman baroque, and even, as the thickset columns of the peristyle proclaimed, of the ancient Greek constructions of Cnossos. But there it stood. Little by little, year after year, time, which in its way always adjusts everything, had managed to make even that unlikely hotchpotch of clashing styles somehow in keeping. Moisè Finzi-Contini, here declared “the very model of the austere and tireless worker,” passed away in 1863. His wife, Allegrina Camaioli, “angel of the hearth,” in 1875. Then in 1877, still youthful, their only son, Menotti, Doctor of Engineering, followed more than twenty years later in 1898 by his consort Josette, from the Treviso branch of the baronial family of the Artoms. Thereafter the upkeep of the chapel, which gathered to itself in 1914 only one other family member, Guido, a six-year-old boy, had clearly fallen to those less and less inclined to tidy, maintain and repair any damage whenever that was required, and above all to fight off the persistent inroads made by the surrounding weeds that were besieging it. Tufts of swarthy, almost black grass of a near-metallic consistency, and ferns, nettles, thistles, poppies were allowed to advance and invade with ever greater licence. So much so that in 1924, in 1925, some sixty years from its founding, when as a baby I happened to see the Finzi-Continis’ tomb for the first time—“a total monstrosity,” as my mother, holding my hand, never failed to call it—it already looked more or less as it does today, when for many years there has been no one left directly responsible for its upkeep. Half drowned in wild green, with its many-hued marble surfaces, originally polished and shining, dulled with drifts of grey dust, the roof and outer steps cracked by baking sunlight and frosts, even then it seemed changed, as every long-submerged object is, into something rich and strange.
