The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  As usual, I had turned round to stare.

  “Would you kindly keep still for just one moment?” he hissed between his clenched teeth, exasperated and fixing me with his blue, choleric eyes. “You don’t know how to behave properly even in the Temple. Just look at your brother—he’s four years younger than you, and could teach you manners!”

  But I took no notice. Soon after, I would be doing the same thing again, turning my back on the psalm-chanting Dr. Levi, oblivious of the warning.

  Now, if he wanted to regain control of me—physically, I mean, only physically—all my father could do was wait for the solemn blessing, when all the sons were gathered under the paternal tallitot in a series of tents. And then, finally (the synagogue verger Carpanetti had already begun his rounds with his long taper lighting one by one the thirty silver and gilded bronze candelabras—the whole room ablaze with lights), as we awaited in awe, Dr. Levi’s voice, usually so colorless, suddenly assumed the prophetic tone in keeping with the consummate, final moment of the berachah.***

  “Jevareheha Adonai veishmereha . . . ”††† slowly began the rabbi, bent down almost prostrate over the tevah, after having once more covered his towering white biretta with the tallit.

  “Come on then, boys,” my father would say, brisk and joyful, snapping his fingers, “Come on in under here!”

  True, even at that moment, escape was still a possibility. Papa had his work cut out, for all his strong grip—his hard sportsman’s hands on the scruff of our necks, of mine in particular. Although vast as a tablecloth, grandpa Raffaello’s tallit, which we used, was altogether too worn smooth and full of holes to guarantee the kind of hermetic seal my father would have liked. And so, through the holes and tears which the years had wreaked on the fabric, frail as could be and pungent with must and antiquity, it was not difficult, at least for me, while there beside him, to observe Professor Ermanno, his hand resting on Alberto’s brown hair and the fine light-blond hair of Micòl, who had just rushed down from the women’s gallery, as he pronounced, one by one, following behind Dr. Levi, the words of the berachah. Above our heads, our father, who knew no more than twenty words in Hebrew, the usual ones of family conversation—and besides he would never have bowed down—kept silent. I could guess the suddenly embarrassed expression on his face, his eyes, half sardonic, half intimidated, raised toward the ceiling’s modest stucco work or the women’s gallery. But meanwhile, from where I was, I could peer up with ever replenished awe and envy, at the lined and sharp visage of Professor Ermanno, who at that moment seemed transfigured. I watched his eyes, which I could have sworn were full of tears behind his glasses. His voice was thin and sing-song, but utterly tuneless, his Hebrew pronunciation, often doubling up the consonants, and with the “z”s, “s”s and “h”s far more Tuscan than Ferrarese, seemed to have been filtered through the dual distinction of culture and class.

  I watched him. For the entire duration of the blessing, Alberto and Micòl—they too—never stopped exploring among the breaches in their tent. And they smiled and winked at me, both of them strangely inviting, especially Micòl.

  • 5 •

  ONCE, HOWEVER, in June 1929, the very day on which the marks for the yearly exams were posted up on the Guarini vestibule noticeboards, something special, something far more direct, took place.

  In the oral exams I hadn’t done that well.

  Despite the fact that Professor Meldolesi had bent over backward to help me, going so far as to ensure, against all the rules, that it was he who would examine me, I hardly ever reached the heights of the many sevens and eights which adorned my school report in the literary subjects. Questioned in Latin on the consecutio temporum, I made a whole series of gaffes. In Greek, too, I had answered with some difficulty, particularly when a page of the Teubner edition of the Anabasis was put under my nose and I was asked to translate a few unprepared lines. Later I redeemed myself a bit. In Italian, for example, besides having been able to give a résumé, with some nonchalance, of the contents of both I promessi sposi and Le ricordanze, I had recited by heart the first three octaves of Orlando furioso without once tripping up. And Meldolesi, at the ready, rewarded me at the end with a “Bravo!” loud enough to cause the whole examining board, even myself, to smile. Overall, though, I repeat, my performance, even in the Arts, fell way short of the reputation I enjoyed.

  But the real fiasco was in math. Since the year before, I just couldn’t get any grip on algebra. And worse still, having banked on Meldolesi’s unfailing support for the final grades, I had always treated Professor Fabiani rather shoddily: I studied the minimum to scrape a six, and often enough not even to that minimum level. Of what earthly use could math be for someone who’d be applying to study literature?—I continually told myself, even on that morning, as I cycled up Corso Giovecca toward the Guarini. Alas, for the orals in algebra, as in geometry, I’d hardly bothered to open my mouth. Which meant . . . ? Poor Signora Fabiani, who during the last two years had never dared give me less than a six, and in the examiners’ meeting she surely wouldn’t have dared to . . . here I avoided even mentally pronouncing the word “fail,” so much did the idea of failing, with all its consequences of crushingly tedious private lessons to which I’d have to subject myself all summer long in Riccione, so much did it seem an alien and absurd concept when referred to myself. To me, of all people, who had never suffered the humiliation of being forced to retake the exams in October, and who had even been awarded in the first, second and third years of middle school the position of “Guard of Honor to the Monument of the Fallen and at the Parks of Remembrance” “for hard work and good conduct”—me, failed, reduced to mediocrity, forcibly demoted to the most anonymous masses! And as for my father? Just supposing Signora Fabiani had forced me to re-sit the exams in October (she taught math at the liceo too, for which reason she had examined me herself, it being her right!), where would I muster the courage, going from there in a few hours, to return home, sit down in front of my father and start eating dinner? Perhaps he would smack me. That, all considered, would have been the best solution. Any punishment at all would have been preferable to that look of reproach which would have frozen me to the spot from his mute, terrible, clear blue eyes . . .

  I entered the Guarini’s main hall. A group of boys, among whom I immediately recognized several friends, were quietly milling round the intermediate years’ noticeboard. Having leaned my bike against the main entrance’s wall, I approached with trepidation. No one had noticed my arrival.

  I looked from behind a fence of shoulders stubbornly turned toward me. My sight misted over. I looked again: and the red five, the only number in red ink in a long row of black numerals, seared itself on my soul with the violence of a branding iron.

  “So what’s the big deal?” Sergio Pavani asked, giving me a gentle thump on the back. “It’s not worth making a tragedy out of a five in math! Have a look at mine”—he laughed—“Latin and Greek.”

  “Don’t take it so badly,” Otello Forti added. “I have to resit one as well—English.” I stared at him, utterly stunned. We had been classmates and had shared a desk from elementary school, and had been used to studying together from that time on, one day at his house, one day at mine, and both of us were convinced of my superiority. Never would a year pass without my going up a year in June, while he, Otello, always had to redo some subject or other.

  And now, suddenly, to find myself compared to an Otello Forti, and to make it worse, compared by him! To find myself cast down to his level!

  What I did or thought in the four or five hours that followed, starting, as soon as I left the Guarini, with the effect wrought upon me by meeting Professor Meldolesi (hatless and tieless, with striped shirt collar turned out over his jacket lapels, he smiled, the good fellow, and was quick to confirm for me Fabiani’s “unbudgingness” toward me, her categoric refusal to “close her eyes yet one more time”)—followed by a description of the long, desperate, aimless wanderings to which I abandone
d myself, having received a gentle cuff on the cheek in the name of friendship and encouragement from the same Meldolesi, is not worth recounting. It’s enough to say that around two o’clock in the afternoon, I was still cycling around along the Mura degli Angeli, in the vicinity of Corso Ercole I d’Este. I hadn’t even telephoned home. With my face streaked with tears, my heart overflowing with enormous self-pity, I pedaled away almost unaware of where I was, and entertained vague thoughts of suicide.

  I stopped beneath a tree—one of those old trees, lindens, elms, plane trees, or horse chestnuts, which, a dozen years later, in the frozen winter of Stalingrad, would be sacrificed for firewood, but which in 1929 still raised their great umbrellas of greenery high above the city walls.

  All around, a complete desert. The little beaten-earth track that like a sleepwalker I’d taken there from Porta San Giovanni snaked on between the century-old trunks toward Porta San Benedetto and the railway station. I stretched out beside my bicycle, face down in the grass, with my burning face hidden in my arms. The warm air wafted round my extended body: my only desire was to remain like that as long as could be, with my eyes closed. Against the narcotic background choir of the cicadas, the odd isolated sound stood out sharply: a cock crowing, the noise of beaten cloth most likely made by a woman out late washing clothes in the khaki waters of the Panfilio canal, and finally, very close, only inches from my ear, the ever-slowing ticking of the bike’s back wheel, still in search of stasis.

  I was thinking that, at home, by this time, they would surely have known—thanks perhaps to Otello Forti. Were they sitting around the table? Probably; even if, soon enough, they would have finished eating. Perhaps they were looking for me. Perhaps they had already collared that very Otello, the good, the inseparable friend, and given him the task of scouring the whole city on his bicycle, plus Montagnone and its walls as well, so it was not in the least improbable that, out of the blue, I’d find him in front of me, his face schooled to sadness by the circumstances, but in truth happy as a lark—I’d be able to see at a glance—that he didn’t have to re-sit anything but English. No, perhaps, overcome by anxiety, at a certain point, my parents would have had recourse to the police station. My father would have gone in person to speak to the police chief in the Castle. I could almost see him: stammering, having grown suddenly, frighteningly old, a mere shadow of his former self. He was weeping. Ah, but if only, around one o’clock, at Pontelagoscuro, he could have seen me as I stared at the Po’s currents from the height of the iron bridge (I stayed there a good while looking down. How long? At the very least twenty minutes!), yes, then he’d definitely have been scared and yes, then at last he’d have understood, yes, then he . . .

  “Psst!”

  I woke up with a start.

  “Psst!”

  I slowly raised my head, turning it left toward the sun. I blinked. Who was calling me? It couldn’t be Otello. Who was it then?

  I was about halfway along that stretch of the city walls, which in its entirety extended for three kilometers, starting from the end of Corso Ercole I d’Este and finishing at Porto San Benedetto in front of the station. It had always been a particularly lonely place. So it was, thirty years ago, and it still is today, despite the fact that to the right especially, facing the industrial zone, from 1945 on, scores of variously colored workers’ cottages have sprouted, in comparison with which, and with the factory chimneys and warehouses that compose their background, the brown, scrubby, half-rocky spur of fifteenth-century fortifications looks day by day ever more absurd.

  I looked and looked, half closing my eyes against the glare. At my feet—only then did I notice—the crowns of its noble trees swollen with midday light like those of a tropical forest, stretched out the domain of the Barchetto del Duca: immense, truly heart-stopping with the little towers and pinnacles of the magna domus at its center, half-hidden in green, and its whole perimeter bounded by a wall which was interrupted a quarter of a kilometer farther on to allow for the flow of the Panfilio canal.

  “Hey! But you must be blind as well!” came the happy voice of a girl.

  Because of those blonde tresses, the distinctive yellow streaked with Nordic flax in the style of the fille aux cheveux de lin, which could only have belonged to her, I instantly recognized Micòl Finzi-Contini. She peered over the wall as if over a window sill, leaning over with her shoulders forward and her crossed arms flat. She could not have been more than twenty-five meters away (near enough then for me to see her eyes, which were large and clear, perhaps too large at that time for the little, thin, child’s face) and she was looking at me up from under.

  “What are you doing up there? I’ve been here watching you for ten minutes. I’m sorry if you were sleeping and I woke you. And . . . my condolences!”

  “Condolences? Whatever for?” I stammered, feeling my face go red all over. I had got up in the meantime.

  “What time is it?” I asked, raising my voice.

  “I make it three,” she said, with an appealing twist of her mouth. And then: “I suppose you’ll be hungry.”

  I was dumbfounded. So even they knew! For a moment I even believed the news of my disappearance had been broadcast to them on the phone by my father or mother, to them and to an endless host of people. But it was Micòl who promptly put me right.

  “This morning I went into the Guarini with Alberto to see the results. So are you very upset?”

  “And you? Did you get put up a year?”

  “We still don’t know. Perhaps they’re waiting for all the other private students to finish before posting the marks. But why not come down? At least come a bit closer so I don’t have to get hoarse shouting.”

  It was the first time she had spoken to me, the first time I had ever heard her speak. And I immediately noticed how similar her pronunciation was to Alberto’s. They both spoke in the same way: stressing the syllables of certain words of which only they seemed to know the true sense, the real weight, but then sliding bizarrely over other syllables which one might have thought had more importance. They made a point of expressing themselves this way. They even gave it a name: Finzi-Continish.

  Letting myself slip down the grassy slope, I drew near to the base of the wall. Although there was shade—a shade that reeked of dung and nettles—down there it was warmer. And now she looked at me from up above, her blonde head in the sun, relaxed as though our meeting had not been in the least a casual, utterly fortuitous one, but as though from early infancy we had met in that exact spot on innumerable occasions.

  “But you’re making such a big fuss about it all,” she said. “Why’s it so bad to have to do another subject in October?”

  She was making fun of me, it was clear. After all, it was not so unheard of for such a misfortune to befall someone of my type, from such a common background, so “assimilated” as to be almost, in fact, a goy. What right did I have to make such a fuss?

  “I think your head’s full of strange ideas,” I replied.

  “Oh yes?” she sniggered, “Then be so good as to tell me why you haven’t gone home to eat?”

  “Who told you that?” The words escaped me.

  “We know what we know. Even we have our informers.”

  It was Meldolesi, I thought; it couldn’t have been anyone else (and as it happens I was right). But what did it matter? All of a sudden I was aware that the question of my being failed was secondary, a babyish matter that would sort itself out.

  “How,” I asked, “do you get up there? You look as though you’re standing at a window.”

  “I’m standing on my trusty ladder,” she replied, overstressing the syllables of “trusty” in her usual disdainful way.

  From over the wall, just then, came a deep, short, slightly raucous volley of barks. Micòl turned her head and cast over her shoulders a bored look, though tinged with affection. She made a face at the dog, then turned back to where I was.

  “Uffa!” she calmly sighed. “It’s Jor.”

  “What kin
d of dog is it?”

  “He’s a Great Dane. Only a year old, but he already weighs a ton. He follows me everywhere. I often try to cover over my tracks, but in a little while there he is again—quite sure of finding me. He’s a pain.”

  She smiled.

  “You want me to let you in?” she asked, becoming serious again. “If you’d like I’ll show you how right now.”

  • 6 •

  HOW MANY years have passed since that far-off June afternoon? More than thirty. And yet, if I close my eyes, Micòl Finzi-Contini is still there, leaning over her garden wall, looking at me and talking to me. In 1929 Micòl was little more than a child, a thin, blonde thirteen-year-old with large, clear, magnetic eyes. And I was a boy in short trousers, very bourgeois and very vain, whom a small academic setback was sufficient to cast down into the most childish desperation. We both fixed our eyes on each other. Above her head the sky was a compact blue, a warm already-summer sky without the slightest cloud. Nothing, it seemed, would be able to alter it, and nothing indeed has altered it, at least in memory.

  “Well, do you want to, or don’t you?” Micòl pressed me, becoming angry.

  “I don’t really know . . . ” I began, nodding at the wall. “It looks very high to me.”

  “That’s because you haven’t looked properly,” she replied impatiently. “See over there . . . and there . . . and there,” pointing her finger to make me look. “There’s lots of notches, and even a nail, up there on top. I put it in myself.”

  “I see . . . there must be some footholds,” I murmured uncertainly, “but . . . ”