The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  He sat up, threw back the covers, swung his legs down out of the bed, and so, walking barefoot on the brick floor, he moved unhesitatingly toward the wardrobe.

  He opened it—and at the sight of the body, his own body, rather than being amazed, he gave a nod of assent. Good. Very good. Utterly naked, whitened gums showing, reduced to no more than the mere puppet he had to be, he was seated, leaning his long cheek, with its growth of black beard, upon his doubled-up knees.

  Then, having closed the wardrobe with exaggerated slowness (only so as not to interrupt the flow of his thoughts, it was clear, for that alone), he found himself, he didn’t know how, in the open air outside the hotel. The air was biting cold. Along the wide avenue that led into the city, on which a cold light had begun to dawn, there was not a living soul to be seen—from the castle to the distant Customs barrier. An equally deserted vista confronted him as he turned the corner. At the end of the straight road he had yet to cover before arriving, the railway station appeared to him grey, small, low, and yet clear in every detail.

  He walked hurriedly, his gaze fixed on the station, which gradually loomed larger. And then suddenly, as soon as he had reached the square in front of it, two things entered his mind: firstly, that he had left in the bedroom at the Albergo Tripoli the big fiber suitcase with all his stuff, its top layer strewn with commercial samples and some personal effects and beneath that the banned political pamphlets; and secondly, that he hadn’t paid his bill. He stopped, not really perturbed but, rather, undecided. And yet, just then hearing a few yards away, but close enough to think it right behind him, the wheeze of an invisible locomotive switching tracks inside the station, and realizing that despite all these concerns, it was too late to turn back, he continued on his way.

  Anyway this was all a dream—he said to himself with a smile of bitter consolation. He knew it was, even while dreaming it: a dream within a dream.

  * The title figure of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (1848); a German romantic character inspired by the mysterious, damsel-rescuing Knight of the Swan in Arthurian legend.

  Further News of Bruno Lattes

  1.

  ENCLOSED all about by an old perimeter wall some three meters high, Ferrara’s Jewish cemetery is a vast grassy expanse, so vast that the gravestones, gathered in separate and distinct groups, appear far fewer than they actually are. On the eastern side, the circling wall is in the lee of the city’s walls, thickly planted even today with big trees—limes, elms, chestnuts and also some oaks—arrayed in a double row along the top of the embankment. At least along this stretch, the war has spared these beautiful, ancient plants. You can only just make out the red sixteenth-century tower that some thirty years ago served as a powder magazine, half hidden as it is behind their broad green domes.

  During the summer months, the grass in our cemetery always grows with a frantic vigor. I’m not sure if that’s still the case, but around 1938, at the time of the Racial Laws, the Jewish community used to entrust the cutting to an agricultural agency from the province: a firm from Quartesana, Gambulaga, Ambrogio or somewhere thereabouts. The scythers advanced slowly, in a semi-circular formation, moving their arms in synchronized rhythm. Every now and then they sent forth guttural cries, and the sentries on guard duty at the nearby powder magazine, hearing those distant voices lost in the dog days’ heat haze (their sentry box standing out, white, over there at the foot of a century old black tree trunk), must have felt all the more strongly the burden of their constraint, all the more keenly their yearning to be free.

  Toward five o’clock in the afternoon, the farm workers would abandon their scything. Overladen with swaying heaps of hay and drawn by a yoked pair of oxen, their carts went out one after the other into Via delle Vigne, where, at that hour, the inhabitants of the neighborhood, pensioners in shirt sleeves with a pipe or a Tuscan cigar between their teeth, old bespectacled arzdóre* intent on darning linen or rinsing vegetables, were almost all seated out of doors, in a row in front of their little one-story dwellings. The street was narrow, little broader even in those days than a country lane. So narrow that if a funeral procession happened to be coming the other way, there would be no other option but to wait patiently, by the busy crossroads of Corso Porta Mare, for five, ten minutes, sometimes even a quarter of an hour.

  As soon as the hearse had crossed the threshold of the big entrance gate, doing so with a leisurely jolt, the sharp smell of mown hay wafted across to liven up the cortège oppressed by the heat. What a relief. And what peace. Immediately there was an abrupt, simultaneous, almost joyful commotion. Some went off among the graves closest to the entrance. Others, the majority, moved away from the now stationary hearse as the gravediggers began to offload the wreaths, and together with them, the compact group of close family and other relatives who had remained in attendance by the coffin then set off at a good pace, a few at a time, toward the distant place of burial.

  Only his father’s insistence (“Cancer spares no one!” he’d declared with his usual pathos, and an air at once emotionally blackmailing and admonitory) had been able to induce Bruno Lattes to attend the funeral of his Uncle Celio. To avoid wasting time arguing. Even to his own surprise, he had been on his best behavior. Not only during the journey down Via Voltapaletto to the cemetery, but also afterward, mingling with the small crowd of relatives and close friends, high on whose heads the coffin had crossed the whole cemetery from west to east, he had behaved himself better than ever, polite, composed, and absolutely calm.

  At a particular moment, though, he relapsed. While the gravediggers were doing their utmost to maneuver the coffin into the grave, his glance caught the bewildered look of his father, a look that instantly made him revert to the blind rage that had become his habitual state.

  What did they have in common—he once more asked himself—he, on one side, and on the other, his father and the whole raft of kith and kin? He was tall, lean, with dark hair and complexion, while his Papa and the long line of relatives, the Camaiolos, Bonfigliolis, Hanaus, Joszs, Ottolenghis, Minerbis, Bassanis and so on, who composed the so-called “Lattes clan,” were mostly short, thickset, with blue eyes, but of a washed-out blue (or if brown of a dull and lusterless tint), and bore unmistakable weak and rounded chins. And as regards character? There too no similarity could be found between him and them, thank God, not the slightest. There was nothing unstable, excitable, morbid in him, nothing that might be considered typically Jewish. His personality was much closer, at least so it seemed to him, to the strong and straightforward character of his Catholic friends, and it was not for nothing that his mother, born a Catholic, as Catholic as can be, was called Marchi. And as for cancer, which ever since 1924—when his grandfather Benedetto, after two years of unspeakable suffering, had died of a stomach tumor—his father had decided that this was unquestionably the family illness (but as for Uncle Celio, no, they shouldn’t talk rubbish: Uncle Celio died as a result of an attack of nephritis, a longstanding condition, and so once in a while cancer could be completely discounted . . .). Let cancer arrive, one day or another, if that’s what it wanted! Please do come in, and why not take a seat! As far as he was concerned, he had already decided some time ago that in such circumstances he’d behave precisely as his mother would have behaved, always so bright and happy, poor thing, always so direct and natural. But to let cancer become a daily goad, an obsession to nurture and cradle within, between fear and delight, for years and years? How revolting! He would never capitulate to cancer in that way. Never ever.

  The coffin now lay in the depths of the grave. The gravediggers had retracted their lowering ropes, and the rabbi, Dr. Castelfranco, with his nasal, singsong voice, was already reciting the prayers for the dead.

  When suddenly the sound of an accordion was heard, very close by.

  Bruno raised his eyes.

  Because of the wall separating the cemetery from the city walls, he could not make out the person playing the instrument. Up there, he could only see a soldier in fro
nt of a sentry box (no doubt guarding the powder magazine), who, tilting his sweating face forward, was nodding in time to the music.

  A woman’s voice was singing:

  Love, my love

  Bring me roses aplenty . . .

  Someone shouted: “Silence!” Other cries of protest ensued, insults and raised fists, a volley of curses. Behind the big trees surmounting the walls, beyond the glistening, dense mass of their foliage, you could sense an open space, almost a sea breeze.

  The spadefuls of earth followed each other ever more swiftly.

  Bruno turned his gaze elsewhere.

  And after supper—he was thinking—when on his bicycle he’d pass this stretch of the city wall, caught between the desire to let his headlight reveal the couples embracing in the grass and the fear of peering out into the cemetery’s black space that lay beneath (since his childhood he’d always had a horror of will-o-the-wisps, of ignes fatui), he wondered if he would have the slightest chance of seeing the young soldier who’d been rooted beside his sentry box. Who knows? Bitterness and disgust: those, anyway, were the feelings he experienced in that moment.

  Still, he knew it—all too well! Impatience, the almost furious agitation which tormented him now, thinking of the sentry on guard at the powder magazine—had they become friends, perhaps they’d have gone together to the cinema, and later, even though he wasn’t yet eighteen, they might have stopped at a brothel . . . might have—all this turmoil wasn’t merely a sudden reaction to the stupid chore that he’d had to put up with today, but surfaced from afar, way back: from a point in the lost past right at the very furthest reach of an almost infinite recession.

  At his grandfather Benedetto’s funeral, in August 1924, before the coffin had been lowered into the grave, the undertakers had unscrewed the lid. Then the corpse, wrapped in an embroidered linen sheet, had been strewn with quicklime, in observance of the most ancient Jewish rite. It had been Grandpa himself who had stipulated this. No sooner had he stopped breathing than someone had immediately rushed off to open the will. The will spoke clearly: the quicklime should be introduced into the coffin afterward, in the cemetery, in front of the open grave. And not earlier, that was to say, at home. Otherwise, woe betide them.

  He was nine years old then. The cemetery green, on which he strode for the very first time—his memory of it remained vivid—was spanned by the first lengthening shadows of evening, along with dense swarms of mosquitoes. And these mosquitoes had seemed to him curiously akin, especially if he covered one eye with his hand, to the fighter planes that one August evening several years earlier he had seen ready to land, silently crossing the huge sky which extended in front of the breakfast-room window where Grandpa Benedetto, for the second time a widower, used to eat alone. The war was still going on. Papa was at the front. And Mamma? Where was his Mamma? Someone, perhaps his Aunt Edvige, who after the death of Grandma Esterina had taken over the running of the house, told him that his mother had left for Feltre, where she was to spend her short leave with Papa. But Feltre? Where was Feltre? And more to the point, what was Feltre? And the rear of which Aunt Edvige had also spoken, what was the rear of the battlelines? The light aircraft lazily descended out of the milky, evening sky, one after the other, without making the slightest noise. To touch them seemed easy. To touch them, he would only need to stretch his arm out from one of the two breakfast-room windows. If there hadn’t, unfortunately, been his grandpa there, who was eating alone and at the same time, with glasses perched on his forehead, reading the newspaper he habitually kept propped up on a jug of water. If his grandpa, able as he was to guess everything, including his most secret thoughts, had understood what he wanted to do, he wouldn’t have told him off, not at all. He would only have stared at him with those hard, piercing, blue-enamel eyes of his. And that would have been far worse.

  That other August afternoon, the one in 1924 on which his Grandpa Benedetto had been buried, the cemetery meadow seemed to have been freshly scythed: exactly as it was now. It was an invitation to run. And, in fact, having slipped his hand from the grasp of his mother, who stayed along with the others beside the grave of his grandfather that was still far from being filled, he went off to play on his own, chasing clouds of mosquitoes and moving ever farther away.

  Suddenly, though, he had fallen: full-length and face down. While he was still falling, he was aware of having grazed his knee. And yet at that moment he hadn’t cared about his knee. He looked round. What solitude all at once! Even though his leg was hurting him, hurting a lot, no one was paying him any attention, not even his mother. The tears on his cheeks dried, very slowly indeed.

  “What have you done?” his mother had cried out when, out of breath, she finally reached his side. “If only you’d keep still for a moment! Don’t you know that Grandpa Benedetto is dead?”

  He paused a while before replying. At last, remembering a phrase he’d heard Papa utter that very morning at table, almost without awareness he’d repeated it exactly: word for word.

  “Only the dead are happy,” he’d said, sighing in the very manner of his father. And at the same time opening his eyes and peering up at his mother, he stealthily checked for a response.

  After staring at him for quite a while with her beautiful brown eyes, deeply circled because of the many nights spent at the bedside of her father-in-law during the last months of his illness, though in spite of that they were more vivid and luminous than ever, his mother had placed her hand over his mouth. Then, kneeling, she’d bound his knee with her handkerchief.

  2.

  THE INSISTENT, furious questions that Bruno Lattes had directed at Adriana Trentini received no reply. To hell with you! Bruno finally thought, exasperated. He looked away.

  He turned his gaze toward the odd, semi-circular window that gave onto the countryside in the direction of Bologna. Along the wide dock road, the Via Darsena, a stream of carts was very slowly passing. From the chimney of the Eridania sugar refinery on the right erupted thick, black, sooty smoke. How well he knew her! he went on thinking. For three years he’d done nothing else but talk. Whereas she, now he came to think of it, had always kept silent. The truth was—his insistence brought on a sudden feeling of lightness, of pure intellectual satisfaction—that even while he was wheeling out the full display of his witty, entertaining, worldly chatter, even then Adriana gave him no reason to trust her. She would, in fact, stand there listening silently, with a threatening air. Like a wall, or like a tree . . .

  When he turned to look at her, he realized she hadn’t moved. He looked and felt a wave of tenderness for her. With her back to the vestibule wall, Adriana fixed her gaze on a point on the floor, and every now and then, brusquely tossing her head, freed her cheeks of the hair that fell on them. But there she was again, giving him a fleeting, sidelong glance, peering up at him . . . What was she hoping to achieve, bitch that she was? Was she perhaps trying to check the time on his wristwatch?

  Then he’d lost all patience.

  “I’m off—I’m going now,” he burst out. “Don’t worry, I’m going.”

  He would have liked to insult her, to call her a whore, to give her a slap. But instead of that, once more he began to feel a tenderness toward her:

  “Goodbye,” he added, as he made his way to the door.

  He felt as if he would never see her again. In the doorway he repeated: “Goodbye.”

  “Ciao,” replied Adriana, without moving an inch.

  That year, the fateful year 1938, winter arrived somewhat late. Only toward the end of October did the first big storms arrive, the first mists. In any case, no earlier than that, and these were the first signs. Bruno hardly ever went out. The Racial Laws had only just been issued. Besides he had told Adriana that he intended to change university to finish his thesis. He’d had enough, he declared, of the usual toing-and-froing between Ferrara and Bologna, enough of all that time wasted on trains! Within days, he meant to transfer to Florence, and stay there . . . But he’d been lying, a
nd now feared that Adriana, when she learned the truth, would judge him as a dishonest, ridiculous little boaster.

  Even at home he showed his face as little as possible: only, in effect, for meals, which anyway he often took alone, or a little earlier or later than the rest of his family. Most of the day he passed shut up in his ground-floor study, where no one ever dared set foot. He spent the hours in a state of inertia. From the high narrow window, above the green velvet armchair and the desk, a colorless light reached the room, insufficient to read by.

  Daydreams continually transported him elsewhere. Sunk into the armchair, he would think of Adriana, and wonder what she would be doing just then. He envisaged her in her room: the room which, starting from last January until the first days of June, when the Trentinis had left for the seaside, for Rimini, he had so often managed to steal into at night. Stretched out on the bed, Adriana would be smoking. But who knows. Perhaps an afternoon of smoking and listening to records might have suddenly bored her. Giving way to one of her abrupt, irrational whims, maybe just out of simple curiosity, one day or another she might phone him. She might phone and he, naturally, would rush round. He’d go by bike, across the city, and there he would be, under the windows of her house, signaling by the usual whistle, their whistle. He’d run up the stairs, and find her in front of him. He was so worn-out and thin, with so much suffering in his eyes, the Racial Laws had rendered him so pitiful, that Adriana would be unable to resist—she’d throw herself into his arms without the least hesitation.

  “I’d like to stay alone for a while,” she’d told him just before they had separated, before she had shut herself into that frightening silence of hers. “I just want to be a child again. And besides”—she’d added, smiling cruelly—“I’m still only eighteen.”