The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  In a few minutes he reached the avenue on the seafront where, his hands resting on a cement balustrade raised high above the rocks, he had stood for a long while contemplating the sunset. In Abbazia the sun went down on the landward side, as at Rimini. While at Fiume, it would be the opposite. The air was tepid, the light was flustered red, the water a bolt of silk. With all its lights already on and sketching an elegant wake behind it, a fine-looking white steamboat was majestically crossing the gulf. It was heading for the open sea, to the right, having Venice as its most likely destination. When would it reach Venice? If it didn’t have to call at Pola, within a few hours: five or six. Otherwise, tomorrow morning.

  He then began to walk along the sidewalk amidst the crowd of holidaymakers, a crowd still numerous, still joyful, still unaware. He was about to reach the curve beyond which the view of the village of Laurana would appear, and, facing him, with a better view than he now had, the islands of Cherso and Veglia, when a “Good evening!” shouted at his back in an infantile voice (a sharp shout, followed by the hissing tear of bicycle brakes) made him jump and rapidly turn round.

  It was Cesarino.

  Dark, parched by the sun and the salt air, thin as a rake, in a blue-striped T-shirt, white short-trousers and clogs: after having slid forward from his saddle he remained bestriding the bike’s crossbar, still gripping the handlebars. He was catching his breath and grinning. In the red-tinged, darkening light of dusk he reminded one of a Neapolitan street urchin looking for clients. Or else a demon.

  “You looking for Adriana?” he had asked, running the tip of his tongue along his strangely violet-colored, almost asphyxiated lips.

  “How is she?”

  “Very well.”

  “Didn’t she have a headache?”

  “Sure,” Cesarino had quickly replied. “But I think she had . . . her period. Even today she was vicious as a beast. But she’ll be fine tomorrow. When are you going?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He had detached his gaze, and lowered it. From the handlebars of his bicycle, a magnificent blue Bianchi, brand new even if its mudguards were already a bit encrusted, hung something red.

  Bruno had stretched out a hand to touch it. It was a little triangular-shaped pennant of rough canvas, a kind of vermillion tongue, the color of blood, one foot long. He had slowly unrolled it with his fingers, until he had seen a small, unmistakable black sign appear: a swastika.

  “And that?” he had asked, raising his eyes and pointing with his chin. “Why are you flying it here?”

  “Oh, no reason,” was Cesarino’s reply.

  His smile disclosed strong, white teeth, the teeth of a young dog. Then, shrugging his angular shoulders, he’d added:

  “Just ’cos it looks good.”

  * See footnote on p. 41.

  † Giovanni Berchet (1783– 1851) was an Italian Romantic poet.

  ‡ A collection of Spanish ballads.

  Ravenna

  MY oldest memory of Ravenna is of the period immediately after the First World War.

  I must have been six years old.

  In Ravenna, birthplace of Francesco Baracca,* an air show had been organized to honor the memory of the great aviator who died near Mount Montello on the eve of the Armistice. And my father, who only shortly before had laid aside his officer’s uniform, and who was inclined to enjoy the sporting side of everything, including politics, had suddenly had the idea of a “motor excursion.”

  Of that drive to Ravenna I recall quite a number of details: a stop at Lavezzola to change a tire on the way there; the new, crisp grass of the airfield, the aviators with violent eyes, nearly all of them dark-haired and with mustaches like those of Baracca and his friend Ruffo di Calabria—and also like Uncle Giacomo, my mother’s only brother—all of them standing rigidly to attention in front of the big motionless propellers of the machines lined up for the opening ceremony; the frightening roar of a fighter plane that later, without warning, had headed straight for the crowd, causing everyone to take to their heels . . . But there is one incident I remember with particular vividness. It was dusk, and we were on the way back. Having passed the banks of the Reno, we were approaching Argenta. When suddenly a group of young, agricultural laborers who were taking up the left side of the road, let out a cry:

  “Sharks!”

  A sinewy, sunburnt arm threatened us with a scythe. Curved and shining, the blade rose high above his head. Like a flag.

  “Death to the sharks!”

  Papa’s delicate hand, the hand of a gentleman and a surgeon, detached itself rapidly from the steering wheel, opened the glove compartment and, hey presto! withdrew a revolver. We had already gone past, the gesture had no purpose, not even as a show of force, and so the truth is that a moment later the revolver disappeared again into its hiding place. But from that moment I knew that the Romagnoli farm workers, whom we called “Bolsheviks” in our family, had a grudge against us because we owned a Fiat, a Fiat Due. Given the chance, the Bolsheviks would even be prepared to rob us of it, our beautiful car. But they wouldn’t be allowed to. On our side, to defend our right of ownership, there were the fighter aces with whom we had fraternized that morning at the Ravenna airfield. And then what was the worst a scythe could do against a black revolver, a revolver that fired real bullets?

  Leaving Ferrara by way of the Porta San Giorgio, after some thirty kilometers you find yourself before a kind of wall which seems to bar the way, to stop all further progress. It is the Reno, the left bank of the Reno. After that begins the region of Romagna: a plain no less flat than that of Ferrara, but cut through by big, smooth, straight and endless roads which lead to Ravenna and then to the sea.

  I was ten or eleven years old. We had already begun to spend our summers at Viserba, at Rimini, at Riccione, at Cattolica, at Cesenatico and always as our means of transport we would travel in one of the other cars that we had owned after the Fiat Due (I remember an O.M., an Ansaldo, a white S.P.A.), crammed with suitcases, deckchairs and various household goods and odds and ends. Before 1930, the roads were not asphalted. It would take a whole morning to cover the hundred or so kilometers that separated Ferrara from the Romagnoli beaches.

  We would arrive in the main square of Ravenna—a city of low houses, even lower than those of Ferrara, with narrow, winding streets—around midday, with the July noon sun at its height. And, especially in the first years, it was right there, in the main square, after having parked the car in the shade, next to a cafe crowded with heavy-set men, with suntanned faces and velvety-black feverish eyes, that we allowed ourselves a half-hour of repose. We would enter the cafe to buy something—my mother and father an espresso, the driver Dino a mortadella sandwich and a glass of Albana, and us children an ice cream, which for fear of typhoid could never be anything but lemon. Huge and shadowy, echoing with stentorian voices, with peremptory exclamations, this place was where the regional Fascist action brigades were almost permanently stationed. My father, who had begun at about this time to distance himself from Fascism somewhat—though he wouldn’t break definitively with the Party until many years later in the era of the Racial Laws—would look at them with a curious expression which was a mixture of admiring pride and repugnance.

  No—he would say to my mother in an undertone—compared with these stalwarts, our own Ferrara Fascists were nothing. That one there, at the back, for example—he’d continue nodding toward them with his chin—must be the Consul Braga. In 1920, perhaps even 1919, a young Socialist had thrown a hand bomb into the cafe where we were now seated. The bomb had exploded and had killed several people. And then he, Braga, although wounded in the leg, had found the strength to drag himself outside, to take a revolver from his jacket pocket, and flat on his belly and cool as can be had taken aim and bang!—he’d fired. The perpetrator was already some way off, no less than a hundred meters, but Braga’s bullet went through his skull, and dropped him dead. Oh, that Ravenna brigade was famous for the little games they invented! Car races in rev
erse; night-time shooting contests, with the street lamps on the road to the station at Ravenna, or at Cesenatico, or else those on the promenade chosen as targets; sumptuous dinners, sometimes in dinner jackets, during which it might happen that a beautiful woman from the highest society in evening dress who was present with her husband, would at a certain point erupt in a scandalized outburst due to the fact that in the plate of risotto she’d been given, they’d mixed in who knows what hideous stuff . . .

  Later on, after 1930, instead of ending up in the square, we would stop outside the city, in Sant’ Apollinare in Classe.

  We would go through the Porta Cesarea into a landscape suddenly changed from the torrid green one we had just passed: an immense landscape, pervaded by breezes that already had the taste of salt, bounded on one side by the uninterrupted black line of the Classe and Cervia forests and, on the other, by the blue, cloud-veiled hills of Bertinoro, Verucchio and San Marino. By then we wouldn’t all be traveling together. As a rule my brother Ernesto and I would come by bicycle. We’d leave Ferrara at the first light of dawn, preceding by at least three hours the big, suffocating O.M. saloon car which, with my father always at the wheel, transported the rest of the family.

  The pact we agreed on was the following. Whoever first reached Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, four or five kilometers after Ravenna, would wait for the others to arrive. And between our father and us a kind of unspoken competition was always in play. Who would get there first—we relying on our legs and lungs or he driving his still brand new O.M.?

  Covered in dust and drenched with sweat, sometimes we managed to cross the finishing line, which was the entrance to the basilica, ahead of them. And every time the chill of the interior, the bluish-green light that suffused it, would seem to us the very same that we’d encounter a little farther on at the seaside.

  I have always been struck, in Ravenna, by the intensity of the contrasts, the possibility of a coexistence, within the borders of a single urban conglomeration, of things, of people, of feelings that are so radically different.

  In Cesenatico, where we went for our holidays on eight consecutive summers, we made friends with many families from Ravenna: with the Cagnoni-Bittis, in particular, and with the Baldellis. The Cagnoni-Bittis were practicing and militant Catholics; the Baldellis anarchists and anti-clerical. The Cagnoni-Bittis were moderately anti-Fascist, the Baldellis violently so. What induced them, at the beach, to band together in the same group of boys and girls except the shared city of their birth?

  Nullo Baldelli erupted at times, without apparent motive, in atrocious, elaborate oaths which his younger brother Libero would quickly echo. To hear them, Ernesto and I would be truly shocked. But the seven Cagnoli-Bitti brothers and sisters remained completely unfazed. Although they went to Mass every morning, the three girls put up with the curses of Nullo and Libero Baldelli without even batting an eyelid. It was evident that for them cursing hadn’t the slightest significance. What mattered was the secret passion, the dark, rebellious, internal lava that impelled them at a certain point to boil over and explode. The angry flash which lit up on each such occasion the velvety, febrile brown eyes of Nullo and Libero was evidently of the same intensity as that which burned in the depths of the eyes of the five males of their family: the four brothers and the father, the lawyer Luigi, ex-deputy of the People’s Party.†

  In Ravenna, in 1935, I also got to know a certain Buscaroli, Vezio Buscaroli.

  Although he spent his summer holidays in Cervia, I had already learned a great deal about him: first, that he lived in a fine house with a tennis court in the middle of a pine forest; secondly, that he aspired to the literary life, and had even, the year before, published a slim volume of poems; thirdly, that he enjoyed the high esteem of the original Fascist troops in Ravenna, the pistolero Braga foremost amongst them, ever since he’d married a magnificent girl from Massa Lombarda. At the beach I had often heard it said, by the older boys of the group, by Nullo Baldelli and Minto Cagnoni-Bitti, that the wife, a formidable big brunette, betrayed poor Buscaroli shamelessly. And right under his eyes. Who knows if this was true. Despite him having his head in the clouds, or perhaps precisely because of that, nothing would have been easier than for the Fascist Federation to give him some task or other, have him write a piece for a review or a newspaper, something of the sort. That way one of them could take his place.

  One August afternoon, around three o’clock, invited by Buscaroli himself, who, though he himself never in fact played any sports at all, had landed the role of organizing a tennis match between teams representing Cesenatico and Cervia, we, the Cesenatico team, rolled up in front of his house. There were six or seven of us, all on bicycles and in tennis kit. Buscaroli was sitting in his garden, in the shade. Slumped in a deckchair, he was reading a book.

  Having opened the wooden gate, we approached him. And as he said nothing, nor even got to his feet, but merely looked up at us with his bewildered, blue eyes, we felt forced to explain to him why on earth we were there. It transpired that after having organized the match, wearing everyone down with his express postcards and telephone calls, Buscaroli had forgotten the whole thing. Completely forgotten it. The evidence lay before us: there among the garden’s pine trees stood the tennis court with its net in shreds and the surface utterly unfit for play.

  What an idiot!—Buscaroli said of himself, tearing at his hair and without even the strength to get to his feet.—What a complete halfwit! What a ghastly impression he must have made!

  Shattered, there was nothing more he could say. Then there she was, his beautiful wife, just that moment back from the beach in her Jantzen swimwear and clogs, coming toward us to take up the role of hostess and, with a candid smile flashed round the circle we made, to adroitly dispel her husband’s intense discomfort . . .

  We were married in August 1943, during the Badoglio period.

  While, ever more numerous, the German tanks swooped down from the north and the Allied bombardments increased, we spent our honeymoon between Ravenna, Marina di Ravenna, Cervia and Rimini. It was me who chose those resorts. I wanted to show them to Val, who hardly knew them. The future was so uncertain! It was essential she saw them right now while there was still a chance.

  We stayed for eight consecutive days at Marina di Ravenna, house guests of a Socialist butcher with whom, every evening, under the lamp in a small and airless breakfast-room, I engaged in long, boring political arguments. But during the day we were always by the sea. Up and down and back and forth. In a batana‡ hired for a few lire, we once went to Cesenatico, and another time almost managed to get as far as Comacchio.

  We would usually sail two or three kilometers from the shore, with our eyes always turned back to the pine forests that rose like dark terraces behind the white undulating profile of the sand dunes. From the open sea beyond Marina, through the narrow harbor channel, it sometimes happened that, veiled in the distance, we could make out the rooftops of Ravenna, the stocky bell towers and broad domes of its churches.

  In the violet sky of evening (as the sun set behind the shoreline woods, it thrust blades of the most poignant green light between the rough ancient trunks) little silvery fighter planes made trial swoops and loops. Then, and only rising up at the last moment, they would go into a nose dive fiercely aimed at our little sailboat. And the searing roar they made, as they skimmed above our heads which ducked so close together, filled us with a childlike joy, which was mingled for me with the hidden sadness of a valediction.

  * Francesco Baracca, a famous ace fighter, was born in Lugo di Romagna, about 40 kilometers from Ravenna.

  † The PPI (Partito Popolare Italiano) was a Christian-Democratic party founded in 1919 in opposition to the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano).

  ‡ A sailing boat of about five meters’ length, typical of the Comacchio region.

  Les Neiges d’Antan

  1.

  THERE was always something that stopped me becoming a friend of Marco Giori, I mean a real
friend.

  The Gioris weren’t from Ferrara, but from Ambrogio, and so from the countryside. And since, in the low-lying lands bounded by the Po and the Reno, the city has never seen eye to eye with the country, without doubt this was a stumbling block, the first one.

  A second hindrance: the age difference.

  In 1930, when Marco was twenty, I was only fourteen. Which meant: I still wore short-trousers, or at best plus-fours. I went around on a standard black Bianchi bicycle from which I’d stripped the mudguards, hoping that might give it the air of a racing bike . . . I was renowned, and privately gloated over the fact, for my high marks in school . . . All in all, I was nothing but a putòn, a mere kiddie.

  Marco Giori at that time was far from being a putòn, that’s for sure. Furnished with a car, a cream-colored De Soto “Spider” in which, left elbow leaning out of the side window, he was wont to drive between the railway station and the Prospettiva Arch, up and down, no less than thirty times a day. By this time he was at university (having graduated from school by the old San Marino trick: he’d enrolled in Agriculture at Bologna); but above all he was tall, elegant, with ash-blond hair parted on one side of his sloping forehead à la Cary Grant, and with steel-grey eyes: there was no other youth in the city at that time who could claim to be more conspicuous or more admired than he was.

  The consequence for me was that when I was riding my bike down Corso Giovecca, and in the distance spied the slender, limber form of Marco standing out at the center of a group of his contemporaries, I not only lacked the courage to stop, which anyway would have been absurd, but even to shout out a simple “Ciao.” They, the youth who already made love and went to brothels, some of them almost distinguished enough to enter the envied list of the city’s so-called “degenerates,” were often gathered in a semicircle around some foreign car parked at the curb by a party of tourists passing through. Engrossed as they were in assessing its pros and cons, I merely had to look at them to feel not only different but also inferior. It was obvious my presence counted for nothing. That I might in some way be taken into account was an aspiration futile even to think of.