The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  “Sir!”

  Startled, he stopped and turned.

  From behind the counter, through the smoke and the steam from the expresso machine, the barman was staring at him.

  “The telephone token,” he said. “Don’t forget the token and the Fernet.”

  * Azienda rilievo alienazione residuati: an organization set up at the end of the Second World War for the sale of goods that were confiscated from the enemy or abandoned by the Allies.

  IV

  1.

  WHEN he was outside again—strange, the fog had almost completely cleared—the first thing his eyes fell on was the snout of his Aprilia. To see it from the sidewalk, a little at a tilt and with the windscreen completely dark, it seemed to him even more ancient: a kind of rusty and useless wreck. “Go to hell,” he muttered to himself shrugging his shoulders. His head was once again spinning. It was that shot of Fernet. He should have drunk it slowly and not, as he’d done, knocked it back in one gulp.

  He stepped off the sidewalk and approached the car.

  After having locked the right-hand-side door, he raised his eyes to look about. From over the car’s curved roof the I.N.A. building thrust itself up skyward higher than ever, massive and weighty. She’d said a hundred meters? Perhaps because the air was almost entirely fresh and clear the apartment block seemed much nearer. Through many of the small shutterless windows which dotted the facade in alternately projecting rows, half of them overlooking the square, half Via della Resistenza, he could clearly make out the interiors of the apartments, with people coming and going from room to room, men in shirtsleeves, women, children. Starting from the ground floor, he counted up to the eighth. There, on the floor that was third from the top, no light could be seen. This meant that the master bedroom looked out on the inner courtyard. Or else that Cesarina had already left the room and switched off the light to go into the kitchen.

  He walked round the car and toward the block.

  He thought about Cesarina. He couldn’t remember what type of person she was when she was a girl and Ulderico had begun following her around. From her voice, though, he thought he had a good idea of the kind of woman he would be dealing with in a very short while. He’d worked that out right from the start. He only needed to hear down the receiver her drawn-out, whiny “Yees.” She must be large, fat and placid, quite the opposite of Nives. One of those goodlooking women around forty, who always perturbed him so much that even now, at his age, every time he met one of them on the street he pretended, even to himself, not to have noticed her, not to have even seen her.

  He went over their telephone call, and what she had said, together with the fact that she was alone in the house, gave him the ever more clearcut feeling of facing something decisive and unavoidable, like a kind of fork in the road. Then the more he thought back over her whole way of behaving toward him, apparently so candid and friendly, the more ambiguous it seemed to him. The tu she used with him, for example! But everything else as well, such as her point-blank introduction of the intimacies of their family life—her and Ulderico on Sundays lazing about till late in their big conjugal bed as the children did in theirs—and especially that rustle of bedclothes which had insinuated itself into his ears at a certain point, and other things too, were all equally revealing of her real intentions. And finally, what need had she to let him know, even if it were a joke, that Ulderico had gone out to visit his mistress? The fact was that with this she had wanted to repeat once more, so he should properly understand and have the idea firmly planted in his head, that she was alone in the house, quite alone, and that her husband and her kids wouldn’t be back for at least a couple of hours. So there was no danger. He could come up without any worry. There was enough time, more than enough! Besides, the apartment had two doors, 17 and 18. Should the need arise, she could let him out unobserved by the tradesman’s exit.

  Having arrived at the foot of the block, he stepped onto the sidewalk, then went under the arches at ground floor level. His heart was beating fast and his breathing felt constricted. To calm himself down, he went toward the windows of the agricultural machinery emporium and leaned toward the roll-up security grille. In the midst of other machines of smaller dimensions he recognized through the security grille, through the thick glass pane, a large American tractor, a Caterpillar. In the dim light of the shop he could just discern that it was painted yellow. It was an enormous dark mass. Something shapeless and blind, destitute of any function.

  But what a whore she is—he resumed telling himself. What an out-and-out whore!

  Having lived together for years with a woman of that type, he found it no wonder that Ulderico, who held priests no less than rabbis in total scorn, had been reduced to ending his Sundays in church and receiving the benediction. By and by, who knows what a doddery old man, what a wreck, a woman like that would have made him. In a short span of time she’d furnished him with six children. But now, having sucked him dry, she was evidently busy cuckolding him at full-tilt in front of the whole town, it mattered not a whit with whom: with the barman of Cafe Fetman, barman and perhaps owner, perhaps with Bellagamba, or even—why not?—with that very Gavino Aleotti, who every now and then had worked for her husband, and no holds barred. Large, fat and placid. And most of all a whore. What was so wrong with that?—she was perhaps thinking as she awaited his arrival. If a worker like Gavino Aleotti figured in her list of men, young and robust as he undoubtedly was but nevertheless working class, why shouldn’t she enroll her husband’s cousin from Ferrara as well? The Ferrara cousin was no longer very young, but he was certainly quite as upper class as Rico, if not more so. And then, leaving aside their being related, hadn’t the two of them been great pals, not to say inseparable when they were young, to the extent that up till the moment she became Rico’s lover, the mistress he kept, they’d been in the habit of visiting girls together, even of sharing them?

  7, Via della Resistenza had a door of modest proportions, located at the very far end of the block, there where the arches finished and the usual row of impoverished houses began. He saw it right away, as soon as he’d turned the corner. It had been the small vertical rectangle with the names of the occupants, fixed to the right hand door jamb and faintly lit from within, which made him recognize the door from afar.

  Picking up his pace, he walked in that direction. He felt exactly like when as a boy he’d just taken his high school exams and for the first time, accompanied by Ulderico, he’d crossed the threshold of a brothel, he couldn’t recall whether in Bologna or Padua. Or when, on those days around the August holiday, he and Ulderico had gone by car to climb in the mountains; when, having arived at the foot of Mount Pala or Mount Tofana, there was nothing to be done but steel himself, overcome the nausea which inevitably at that moment gripped his stomach and, after being roped together, to follow the others toward a fate which no earthly power could have forced upon him apart from the will of those who were dragging him after them.

  He approached the entrance. He bent to inspect the list of surnames. He read cavaglieri, ulderico, Engineer.

  While he was close to the faint reddish light, he glanced at his watch—it was six-thirty—and calculated that the time at his disposal was quite enough to do the needful, and told himself it was true, during those long ago Sundays when he and Ulderico went out hunting, they had always ended up first with a big meal and then by going to bed with some local girl, a seamstress, a factory or farm worker, someone, in short, who was willing, whom he could carry off to La Montina himself if needs be, who could be paid off somehow, and who, perhaps after having already been passed between the cousins or between their friends, would usually, in the end, be dumped. Suddenly aware his eyes were on the little hand of his watch, the sedate, familiar, round, gold-framed face of his Vacheron-Constantin, he realized he was in a state of delirium. He’d been raving, he’d no idea for how long. From that morning, from the moment he had awoken, and then for the entire day, he’d been in this state of delirium. And stil
l now. Codigoro. Those arches . . . With a sudden lucidity he asked himself who he was, dressed for hunting, with his fur hat on his head, at that precise moment, under those arches, who on earth was he?

  He took off a glove. He touched the button of the bell, not to ring it but merely to touch it, to feel its texture. Then he stood upright. He walked out from under the arches, and keeping close to the house walls, took the lefthand side sidewalk, on the opposite side of the square toward the river port.

  2.

  IT WAS seven o’clock, approximately.

  Perhaps it would be best to make the most of the fog having almost dispersed, he thought, and instead of wandering around Codigoro staring at the paving stones to return to the square, ring that poor woman Cesarina again to make his excuses, to get into the car and, be done with it all, and set off back to the city. Nevertheless each time such a scheme occurred to him, he dismissed it at once. So ought he to stay? With what end in view? Before the extreme loss of blood had clouded its eyes, the heron must have felt something similar: closed in on every side, without the slightest possibility of escape. With this difference, though, to his disadvantage: that he was fit, quite unimpaired, without having shed a drop of blood, and the dog . . . well, given the possibility one would go for him, he would have no other option but to face it, with his eyes wide open.

  He walked hurriedly, having now reached the end of Via della Resistenza, determined not to turn his gaze toward the freight ships and barges lined up, as they were this morning, along the shore of the river port. But as soon as he became aware of the presence beside him of those motionless, mouse-colored shapes, so motionless as to seem as if rather than floating they were stuck in the muddy bed of the river, he couldn’t resist the temptation to stop and observe them.

  Innumerable times as a boy he’d seen boats lined up this way in the canal ports of Cesanatico, of Cervia, of Porto Corsini—in the happy, interminable holidays that they went on back then, before the war and immediately after. And yet from these low broad boats which instead of being crowned with big, bright, gaudy-colored sails, had light rigging, transparent as gauze, like lazy wisps of fog, snagged on their grim skeletal masts—from these no sense of joy, of life, or liberty could be retrieved. From the deck of a barge anchored far from the quay, almost at the center of the surrounding, mirroring water, two people were moving about, a man and a woman. The man, if his eyes weren’t deceiving him, was a corpulent old guy with white hair and a black Fascist-style pullover; the woman, blonde and very young, wearing a fustian jacket and tight fitting trousers like blue jeans. They were shouting and gesticulating and running around the cabin whose small window revealed a faint light as of a lantern. Their sharp but distant cries, like those of the birds of the valley, the clacking of their clogs on the decking, their grotesque shadows, enlarged by the yellowish light from the hold . . . Unable as he was to draw closer, he felt as though he was the spectator at the edge of a vast square of a puppet show being performed for himself alone. It was all pointless. The old man, the villain, would succeed in the end in grabbing hold of the beautiful girl he was chasing, there was no doubt about it. What then? Even if, having clasped and immobilized her, he had stuck a dagger in her trembling throat, what would have happened that was so serious? You only had to observe life’s events from a certain distance to conclude that all they amounted to was what they were; in other words nothing, or almost nothing.

  Having passed the diagonal street which to the left led on to the cemetery and to the right to the iron bridge which became the old country road that went on to Migliaro, Migliorino and from there, the fork in the road which led to either Ferrara or Lagosanto and Comacchio, he found himself close to a solitary building. He stopped for a second time. Strange that over so many years he’d never paid it much attention. It was a large ancient manor house with a Venetian air, of the kind which was relatively common just on the other side of the River Po, in the lower Polesine district. With its fine, two-storied facade which overlooked the canal, therefore south-facing, and with ample space in front to plant trees, this would certainly, he thought, be a fine place for him to buy and live in! He crossed the street to observe the house more closely. But when he realized the decrepit state it had fallen into—the main door replaced by clumsily nailed boards, the windows without panes or shutters, the roof half stove in so that from below through the first floor window you could even see a patch of sky—he quickly dropped the idea. Disheartened, he imagined the interior, the desolation of empty rooms, fat sewer rats scurrying over the wrecked flooring, the black mouth of the big smashed fireplace on the first floor from which on stormy days terrible gusts of wind would wreak havoc from one end to the other of the big reception room, the splinters of wood—pieces flaked off the rotten shutters, off the doors that would have fallen from their hinges many years before—scattered nearly everywhere, and the dust, the cobwebs, the reek, the darkness. No. To resurrect a carcass like that would need too much strength of every kind. Perhaps not even Ulderico could have managed, the Ulderico of fifteen years ago when, still young, he had suddenly decided to leave everything behind, get married to an undistinguished woman, the nearest to hand, convert, set up house and family in the depths of the Bassa, and effectively disappear.

  He walked away, but at the first crossing took a left, once more entering the thick of the inhabited zone.

  He walked down one street after another—dismal little roads flanked by the small, one-story houses of the town’s oldest district. He met no one. From the gaps in the closed shutters filtered the pinkish light of impoverished families. All he heard was the odd scrap of sound from radios.

  At crossings he lifted his eyes to read the street signs. He knew it: just after the Liberation almost all of the street names had been changed. Narrow alleys had been dedicated to no lesser figures than Carlo Marx, Federico Engels and Giuseppe Stalin, to Antonio Gramsci and to Clelia Trotti—the famous elementary school teacher and socialist who died of consumption during the winter of 1944 here at Codigoro’s local jail—to E. Curiel and so on. The pre-war ceramic signs had not been taken down, but simply covered over with plaster. And on the layer of plaster they had handwritten the new names, with a brush dipped in black paint. Reading them was not an easy task. Time and bad weather were already erasing them. He spelled out: LO MAR, ANTON GRAMSCI, E. CURIEL, USEPPE TALIN, C E IA ROTTI. He filled in the blanks of the missing letters. And didn’t walk on until he’d succeeded.

  In Via Antonio Labriola, which must have been just behind the square, he was stopped in his tracks by two discreetly lit ground floor windows. He drew close to the nearest one, and standing a little to one side looked inside through the glass.

  In front of him was a low ceilinged, medium-sized, rectangular room—clearly some kind of eating house. The walls hung with pots and copper pans, the sooty fireplace, the two tables each occupied by four card players who wore hats or berets and had a glass of red wine inches from their elbows left him in no doubt about that. But why was it that those eight players, so silent and motionless, although they resembled in every way the customers in Bosco Elòceo and Cafe Fetman, seen here, closed in this room behind the pane of glass, should look so strange and out of reach?

  He focused his attention on the four who sat at the nearest table. All of them were between thirty and forty; at least three of them looked like laborers. The one to the right, thin, bony, his cheeks dark with stubble, and a hooked nose in profile, might have been a bricklayer. The one in front, in the middle, with a big face and snub nose, with his black beret at an angle and his oil-stained hands, a mechanic. The third, to the left, crouched in the wickerwork chair, hunchbacked in his cyclist’s sweater might also have been a bricklayer, or perhaps a farm worker, one of those who tends the animals. The fourth, by contrast, broad-shouldered, chunky, thick-necked, with a brown homburg at a rakish angle, was not a workman, that was for sure, but perhaps an employee of the Land Reclamation Company or of the Eridania or a small landowner. There
wasn’t a spare seat in the room. Everyone and everything fulfilled a precise function. He felt as though he was before a framed painting. Impossible to enter into. There was no place and no space not taken.

  What should he do? Where should he go?

  He lifted his arm and exposed his watch face to the light. Ten past seven.

  He pulled away from the window, and spotted the dark form of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice’s apse and its bell tower sited across the end of the alleyway. There it was. In church he’d surely find a pew to rest on. He could sit apart, in a corner, so as not to be seen should Ulderico and his children arrive. Crossing the threshold would be the only moment in which he’d run any risk. But was it at all likely that he’d meet the Cavaglieris as he was entering? In any case it was worth being careful.

  He would never have guessed the church’s interior was so vast. With a single nave and its unadorned roughcast walls, and its floor almost entirely filled by two rows of pews divided by an aisle which led to the main altar, it made him think of a cinema, an empty out-of-hours cinema where nothing was showing. There was hardly a soul. Only the priest and a novice down there by the altar, busy preparing something, and four or five old women hunched here and there in the pews.

  Halfway up the sidewall opposite the entrance he noticed a chapel, the only one: a half-dark niche containing nothing but a large black crucifix carved in wood. It was there he’d find a place for himself. Should it prove necessary, he’d withdraw to the back of the chapel. On tiptoes, he made his way there.

  Once he was seated, he began to scrutinize the distant, incomprehensible activities of the priest and the novice scuttling between the main altar and the sacristy. He still felt far from at ease. Having taken off his cap, his head felt cold. Besides, the proximity of the crucifix, of that blackened, nailed corpse, disturbed and intimidated him.