The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  Assiduous and punctual, Giampiero Malnate would also come with almost the same regularity. Talking, disputing, often arguing (in short, hating and loving each other from the first moment), it was thus that we got to know each other deeply, and we very quickly adopted the “tu” form of address.

  I remembered how Micòl had expressed herself on the subject of his “physique.” I too found Malnate bulky and oppressive. Like her, I too very often felt a kind of acute intolerance for his sincerity, his loyalty, for the eternal plea he made for manly openness, for that calm faith of his in a Lombard and Communist future which shone from his grey, too-human eyes. Despite this, from the first time that I sat in front of him, in Alberto’s studio, I was filled with a single desire: that he should respect me, that he should not consider me as an interloper between himself and Alberto, that, finally, he would not deem as utterly mismatched the daily trio of which, certainly not from his own initiative, he found himself a part. I think that my own habit of smoking a pipe goes back precisely to that period.

  The two of us spoke of many things (Alberto preferred to listen), but, obviously, most of all about politics.

  These were the months that immediately followed the Munich Agreement, and it was this, and its consequences, which was the most recurrent topic of our conversations. What would Hitler do now that the Sudeten lands had been incorporated within the Greater Reich? In what direction would he strike next? For myself, I wasn’t a pessimist, and every now and then Malnate would think I was right. In my opinion, the entente which France and England had been forced to subscribe to at the end of the crisis that had occurred last September wouldn’t last for long. True. Hitlr and Mussolini had induced Chamberlain and Daladier to abandon Beneš’s Czechoslovakia to its fate. But then what? With the change of Chamberlain and Daladier for younger, more decisive men (that’s the advantage of the parliamentary system!—I exclaimed), within a short while France and England would be in a position to dig in their heels. Time would surely play in their favor.

  Yet if the conversation turned to the war in Spain, now on its last legs, or if there was any reference to the Soviet Union, Malnate’s behavior toward the Western democracies and toward me, to all intents and purposes ironically considered their representative and paladin, would abruptly become less flexible. I can still see him thrusting his big brown head forward, his forehead shining with sweat, to fix his gaze upon mine with his usual, unbearable attempt at emotional blackmail, caught between moralism and sentimentalism, to which he willingly had recourse, while his voice took on a low, warm, persuasive, patient tone. Who were they, then—he’d ask—who were the people truly responsible for the Francoist rebellion? Weren’t they by any chance the French and English right, who’d not only tolerated it, at the start, but then, later, even supported and applauded it? Just as the Anglo-French response, correct in its form but actually ambiguous, had allowed Mussolini in 1935 to swallow up Ethiopia in a single mouthful, so in Spain it had mostly been the blameworthy dithering of Baldwin, Halifax and Blum that had swung the balance of fortune in Franco’s favor. It was pointless to blame the Soviet Union and the International Brigade, he insinuated ever more gently, pointless to make Russia the easy scapegoat for every idiot, responsible if events down there were now at the point of collapse. The truth was quite different: only Russia had understood, from the very beginning, exactly what Il Duce and the Führer were. She alone had clearly foreseen the inevitable alliance between them, and had consequently acted in time. On the contrary, the French and English right wings, subverting the democratic order as did every right wing of every country in every period, had always looked on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany with ill-concealed sympathy. Sure, to French and English reactionaries, Il Duce and the Führer might seem slightly inconvenient types, a shade crude and exaggerated, but still in every way preferable to Stalin, because Stalin, as we all know, has always been the devil. Having attacked and invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, Germany was already pressing on the borders of Poland. So, if France and England were reduced to the level of gawping and accepting everything, the blame for their present impotence fell squarely on the shoulders of those fine, worthy, eye-catching gentlemen in top hats and tail-coats (so well suited at least in their manner of dressing to the nineteenth-century nostalgia of so many decadent, literary types . . . ) who were now in government.

  But Malnate’s polemics became even more heated every time the topic of Italian history over the last decades cropped up.

  It was obvious—he said: for me, and for Alberto too, Fascism in the end represented nothing but the sudden, inexplicable illness which afflicts and betrays the healthy organism, or else, to use a phrase dear to Benedetto Croce, the guru you share (here Alberto never failed to shake his head desolately, as a sign of denial, but Malnate paid no attention to this), “the Invasion of the Hyksos.” For us two, in conclusion, the Liberal Italy of Giolitti, Nitti, Orlando and even that of Sonnino, Salandra and Facta, had all been fine and dandy, the miraculous product of a golden age to which, in every respect, if only that were possible, it would be desirable to return. And yet we were wrong, just see how wrong we were! The illness had not arrived in the least bit unannounced. It began a long way back, in fact, in the earliest years of the Risorgimento, which were characterized by—let’s admit it—an almost total absence of the people’s participation—the real people—in the cause of Liberty and Unity. Giolitti? If Mussolini had been able to get over the crisis caused by the murder of Matteotti, in 1924, when all around him seemed to be losing their heads and even the King started swithering, we had our Giolitti to thank for that, and Benedetto Croce too—both of them quite willing to install in power whatever monstrous toad happened to be around—anything to make sure the progress of the working classes would be impeded and slowed down. It was actually them, the Liberals we worshipped, who gave Mussolini the time to get his second wind. Less than six months later, Il Duce had repaid them for their services by crushing the freedom of the press and dissolving the other parties. Giovanni Giolitti retired from political life, withdrawing to his country estates in Piedmont. Benedetto Croce went back to his precious philosophic and literary studies. But there were others, far less responsible, in fact entirely guiltless, who had had to pay far more painfully for all this. Amendola and Gobetti were bludgeoned to death. Filippo Turati was snuffed out in exile, far from the Milan where but a few years earlier he had buried his poor wife Anna. Antonio Gramsci had been thrown into one of our illustrious jails (didn’t we know that he’d died in prison last year?). Italy’s urban proletariat and its agricultural laborers, together with their natural leaders, had lost every effective hope of social justice and human dignity, and now for almost twenty years had been vegetating and dying in silence.

  It was not easy for me to oppose these ideas, for various reasons. In the first place because Malnate’s political knowledge, the Socialism and anti-Fascism which, at home, he’d taken in with his mother’s milk, quite overpowered my own. In the second place because the role he’d boxed me into—the role of literary decadent, as he said, whose political formation had been under the guidance of Benedetto Croce’s writings—seemed to me inadequate and inaccurate, and therefore had to be refuted before any further disagreement between us could get under way. The truth was that I preferred to be silent, molding my face into a vaguely ironic smile. I submitted to him, and kept quiet.

  As for Alberto, he too said nothing; in part because as usual he had nothing to say, but mainly to facilitate his friend’s attacks on me—this was the main advantage, I reckoned. When three people are shut up for days arguing in a room, it is almost always the case that two of them end up in alliance against the third. So as to be in agreement with Giampi, to show his solidarity, Alberto seemed ready to accept anything from him, including the fact that he, Giampi, would often tar us with the same brush. It was true: Mussolini and his ilk were gathering together all kinds of slurs and defamations against the Jews—Malnate would, for example, claim.
Last July’s infamous Race Manifesto, drawn up by ten so-called “Fascist scholars”—it was hard to know whether it was more shameful or more ridiculous. But having admitted this—he added—could either of us tell him how many anti-Fascist “Israelites” there had been in Italy before 1938? Very few indeed, he feared, a tiny minority, if even at Ferrara, as Alberto had told him many times, the number of those enrolled in the Fascist Party had always been extremely high. I myself had taken part in the Littoriali della Cultura. Wasn’t I already reading “the great” Croce’s History of Europe just at that time? Or had I been waiting, before plunging into it, for the following year, the year of the Anschluss and the first warnings of Italian racism?

  Though occasionally I rebelled, more often than not I yielded, smiling. Despite myself, I was overcome by his candor and sincerity, sure, a bit crude and relentless, a bit too goy-ish—I’d tell myself—but after all compassionate, because, essentially egalitarian and fraternal. However, when Malnate sometimes turned on Alberto, not entirely in jest, and accused him and his family of being “at the end of the day” filthy landowners, evil proprietors of country estates and, on top of that, aristocrats clearly nostalgic for medieval feudalism, one reason why “at the end of the day” it wasn’t so unjust that now they should in some way pay the penalty for all the privileges they had hitherto enjoyed; and when Alberto, bent over double to protect himself from these hurricane blasts, would laugh till the tears came to his eyes, meanwhile nodding his head to show that yes, he, personally, was more than willing to pay the price, then I’d experience a surge of secret glee as I listened to him thundering against his friend. The child of the years before 1929, who walking beside his mother along the paths of the cemetery had always heard the Finzi-Continis’ solitary monumental tomb defined as “a total monstrosity,” would suddenly reemerge from the very depths of my being to applaud maliciously.

  There were times when Malnate almost seemed to forget my presence. These generally occurred when he started recalling with Alberto the “times” they had had in Milan, the shared male and female friendships of that era, the restaurants they had been to together, the evenings at La Scala, the soccer matches at the Arena or at San Siro, the weekend trips to the mountains or to the Riviera. They had both belonged to a “group”—one evening he honored me with an explanation—whose demand on its members was a single one: intelligence. A truly wonderful time! He sighed. Characterized by scorn for every kind of provincialism and rhetoric, that time might be best defined, not only as that of their happy youth, but as the time of Gladys, a ballerina at the Lirico who had for some months been a friend of his—seriously, Gladys wasn’t at all bad, a great laugh, “good company,” at heart utterly without designs on anyone, and blithely promiscuous . . . and then having lucklessly fallen for Alberto, she’d ended up breaking off all contact with both of them.

  “Poor Gladys, I’ve never understood why Alberto always rejected her,” he added with a slight wink. Then he turned to Alberto:

  “Come on. Spit it out. Three years have passed since then, and the scene of the crime is almost three hundred kilometers from here. Why don’t we finally put our cards on the table?”

  But in response Alberto only blushed, and warded off the question. And Gladys was never mentioned again.

  He enjoyed the work that had brought him to our part of the world—he would often say—even Ferrara he liked, as a city, and it seemed absurd to him, to say the least, that Alberto and I looked on it as a kind of tomb or jail. Obviously our situation could be considered a rather special one. And yet we were wrong to believe ourselves the only minority group in Italy being persecuted. What were we thinking? The workers in the plant where his job was, what did we think they were—beasts without any feelings? He could name many of them who not only had never enrolled themselves in the Fascist Party but who were Socialists or Communists, and for this had often been beaten up or given the castor-oil “treatment,” and yet continued, uncowed, to stand by their principles. He had been at one of their meetings, and was delighted to find there not only the workers and farm laborers who’d come specially, on bikes perhaps, from as far away as Mésola and Goro, but also two or three of the most renowned lawyers in the city. Which went to prove that even here, in Ferrara, not all of the bourgeoisie were on the side of the Fascists, that not all of its ranks were filled with traitors. Had we ever heard Clelia Trotti spoken of? No? Well, she was an ex-primary school teacher, an old woman who when she was younger, they’d told him, had been the pillar of Ferrara’s Socialist movement, and continued to be so—and what a force she was! Not a single meeting was held without her lively and vivid contributions. That was how he’d met her. Regarding her humanitarian kind of Socialism, the type of Andrea Costa, it might be better left without comment, and little could be expected of it. But what passion there was in her, what faith and hope! She reminded him, even physically, especially those blue eyes of hers, that hinted at the blonde she must once have been, of Signora Anna, Filippo Turati’s companion, whom he’d got to know as a boy in Milan around 1922. His father, a lawyer, had served almost a year in prison with the Turati couple in 1898. A close friend of both of them, he was one of the few who, on Sunday afternoons, still dared to call on them in their small flat in the Galleria. And Malnate would often go along with him.

  No, let’s be honest, Ferrara was not at all the prison that someone overhearing us might think it was. It’s true that seeing it from the industrial zone, shut up as it seemed to be within its old walls, especially on days of bad weather, the city might easily give the impression of solitude and isolation. Yet all round Ferrara was the countryside, rich, abundant, fertile, and beyond it, less than forty kilometers away, was the sea, with empty beaches bordered by lovely pine and ilex woods. And the sea is always a great resource. But this apart, the city itself, once you threw yourself into it as he’d decided to, once you considered it without prejudice, was like every other city, hiding treasures of human virtue, intelligence and goodness of heart, and even of courage, which only the deaf and blind, or rather the sterile, could ignore or misconstrue.

  • 5 •

  AT FIRST, Alberto kept on announcing his imminent departure for Milan. Then, bit by bit, he stopped mentioning it, and his graduation thesis ended up becoming a thorny question we had to skirt around with some caution. He made no further reference to it, and it was clear he wanted us to follow suit.

  As I’ve already suggested, his interventions in our arguments were rare and almost always irrelevant. He was on Malnate’s side, of this there was no doubt, happy if he should triumph, worried if, on the contrary, I seemed to be getting the upper hand. But mainly he kept silent. At the most, he would come out with some exclamation every now and then (“Ah, that’s good, though! . . . ,” “Yes, but, if looked at another way . . . ,” “Hold on a second, let’s be calm about this . . . ”), following up with a short laugh or a little bit of embarrassed throat-clearing.

  Even physically, he had the tendency of cringing back, of cancelling himself out, of disappearing. Malnate and I would generally sit facing each other, in the middle of the room, one on the sofa and the other on one of the two armchairs, with the table in the middle and both of us right under the light. We would only get up to go to the small bathroom next to the bedroom, or else to check what the weather was like through the big broad window which looked out over the park. By contrast, Alberto preferred to stay down there at the end of the room, protected by the double barricade of the desk and the draftsman’s table. Those times he bestirred himself, we would see him wander up and down the room on tiptoe, his elbows drawn in to his sides. He would change the records on the radiogram, one after the other, careful that the volume did not drown out our voices, survey the ashtrays, and empty them in the bathroom when they were full, regulate the brightness of the side-lighting, ask in an undertone if we could do with a little more tea, straighten out and reposition certain objects. In short, he adopted the busy, discreet air of the master of the ho
use concerned only about one thing: that the acute minds of his guests should be allowed to function properly within the best possible surroundings and conditions.

  I’m convinced, though, that it was he, with his meticulous orderliness, with his stratagems, with his cautious unpredictable maneuvers, who was responsible for diffusing the vague sense of oppression which shadowed the very air we breathed there. It was enough for him, in the pauses of the conversation, for instance, to start expatiating on the qualities of the armchair in which I was sitting, whose back “guaranteed” the most correct and favorable “anatomical” alignment for the spine; or, offering me the small, dark leather pouch for pipe tobacco, to catalogue the various kinds of cut according to him indispensable for our Dunhill or GBD to obtain the optimum flavor (such-and-such a quantity of sweet, of strong, of Maryland); or, for motives never quite made clear and known only to himself, to announce with a vague smile, lifting his chin toward the radiogram, the temporary exclusion of sound from one of the loudspeakers—in every case of such or similar kind, I would experience a bristling of nerves which was forever lying in wait, forever ready to burst forth.

  One evening I didn’t manage to suppress them. Certainly—I shouted out to Malnate—his dilettante-like behavior, essentially that of a tourist, let him assume toward Ferrara a tone of tolerance and indulgence which I envied. But how would he, he who spoke so much about the treasures of human virtue, goodness, etc., how would he judge something that had happened to me, personally, only a few mornings ago?

  I’d had the bright idea—I began to tell them—of taking myself, my papers and books, to the Reading Room of the Public Library in Via Scienze—a place I’d hung around since my school days and where I always felt at home. Everyone always treated me very courteously there, within those ancient walls. After I’d enrolled in the Faculty of Arts, the Director, Dr. Ballola, had begun to consider me a scholar like himself. As soon as he spotted me, he’d sit down beside me to keep me abreast of the progress of some of his by now ten-year-old research material to do with a biography on Ariosto, filed away in his private study, research about which he declared himself confident “of going some way beyond the renowned efforts of Catalano in the field.” So also with the various other staff members there, who acted toward me with such confidence and familiarity as not only to let me dispense with the boredom of filling out forms for the books, but even to let me smoke the occasional cigarette there.