The Novel of Ferrara

by André Aciman

  It has never crossed my mind to establish where the actual home of al duturét is, nor whether he has a wife, children, any family at all. Do these things matter? For what concerns me, it’s enough to know that I can find him permanently stationed on the threshold of his “studio” in Via Garibaldi and, furthermore, unchanged, with that white doctor’s smock of his unbuttoned on his slender torso, with the same cadaverous and bony face, with his black, impassive eyes, somewhat veiled, and with that small, circumflex-like mouth, twisted and withered. After so many years, wasn’t it wondrous that he should have retained intact the very same air of aged youth he’d had around 1937? And isn’t it right that I should be thankful to him for being, as he was, the living image of fidelity?

  I like the fact that he’s always the same, and as ever I like going in to have a chat with him.

  The place is a cubbyhole of no more than three by four meters. Uller seated behind a small desk-table with Perspex shelves, I in front, on an armchair made of nickel-plate tubing. And since Uller never switches on the light except in cases of dire necessity (he doesn’t care for light—neither of the electric nor the natural variety, in fact he cares so little for it that he wears dark glasses even at night), when it starts to get dark outside we have every right to be confident that no one passing by outside on the sidewalk will be able to make us out. A strange feeling, anyhow! We here, invisible, as though outside of time, as though we were dead. And there, by contrast, drawn every now and then by the dazzling neon of the shop window and the displayed photos, the ingenuous, faithful, unconscious faces of life, the passers-by, utterly exposed and leaning forward . . .

  All the while Uller keeps talking to me.

  Knowing what I want to hear, he has already begun to recount the decade of 1930 to 1940: the golden era which saw the flowering of one after another degenerate of the caliber of a Geppe Calura, of an “Edel” Fegnagnani, of an Eraldo Deliliers, or a Gigi Prendato. And then, however, quite suddenly, he comes to Pelandra. Certainly not to place him in a single group together with the others, the true degenerates, the great authentic debauchees of his and my own youth, but only to remind me how, for a good ten years, that is from 1938 to ’48, he had done his best, “Puvràz!” poor thing, unquestionably his very best, to become an excellent husband, an outstanding father, the most respectable and dignified of men, and then how, on a day like any other, a Sunday afternoon exactly like an infinite number of such afternoons, he disappeared from his home, from Ferrara, from Italy, perhaps even from the world of the living, without leaving a clue or a trace behind him, nothing at all, not even a rotten corpse.

  “Is that a thing to do?” pronounces al duturét in sage disapproval, nodding his little dark head, carefully brilliantined. “Gnànch un strazz ad cadàver!”*

  Uller doesn’t know what became of Pelandra. On this topic he always confines himself to recording the fanciful rumors he has heard doing the rounds, without adding the smallest conjecture of his own. Had Pelandra also drowned himself in the Po? Had he fallen in Algeria in the ranks of the Foreign Legion, or in Katanga among the throng of mercenaries, or in Vietnam? Was he still alive, under a false name in Paris, Venezuela, Australia, or in some other place? Anything is possible—Uller grants open-mindedly, shrugging. Anything at all.

  Actually he was thinking of something else, and although, given his character, that may seem unbelievable, it was only and always about the human, the moral aspect. Why for heaven’s sake shouldn’t one—he reaches his conclusion—suddenly turn from devil to saint? Much better to sin, then repent, then go back to sinning, then once more repent. A thousand times better to lead a double, triple, even a quadruple or quintuple life rather than . . . No, no—he exclaims—there are some values, family being one of them, for which one has to be willing to swallow one’s pride and to sacrifice oneself.

  “Wouldn’t you say?” he asks in dialect.

  Perhaps I would, perhaps not. Perhaps I agree and disagree at the same time. However, it’s all fine. Suddenly anxious that he gets to the point, I nod in agreement.

  Maybe it didn’t all happen exactly as he described, and yet the scene of the “final cutting of the cord” or rather “the final burning of the boats,” that Uller, starting from this point, and maintaining a stony expression that might have done credit to the most ruthless Chicago gangster, began to recount for the umpteenth time (a joke, when one thinks of it, and hardly a new one!) always had the power to grip my heart with a strange vise, with fascination or fear, I’m not sure which.

  So we’re in the drawing room of the Passetti home—Uller starts off with zest—one October Sunday in 1948, between three and four in the afternoon.

  The house is practically empty. A short while before the old Passetti couple had gone out with their little grandchildren and the maid, the latter pushing the pram of Alcide, the youngest. Looking out of one of the windows that had a prospect of Via Romei, Germana saw them all as one turn into Via Voltapaletto, going in the direction of Montagnone.

  And now, in the drawing room, she pays attention to two things simultaneously: to the small woolen sock which her needles have almost finished knitting, and to the sleeping form of her husband, stretched out at his considerable length on that same sofa on which as fiancés they’d sat exchanging kisses. She looks up and down, up and down. Impartially giving a glance up at her Mario’s back, then down to the short sock of Fabrizio, her eldest. She is a little woman, Germana, at this point around thirty years old, of a rather pleasing aspect, her figure not even too ruined by the many consecutive pregnancies.

  The husband sleeps. A ray of faint autumnal sunshine falls at an angle to gild his well-nourished backside. And Germana suddenly thinks (it will be she herself who later tells this any number of times to more than half the city) that soon, it being past four o’clock, it will be time to say to her husband: “Come on, Mario, wake up.” What they’d be showing at the Salvini she doesn’t know, she can’t remember. But it would be rather annoying to bustle in when the film had already started.

  But a moment hadn’t passed before the erstwhile Pelandra himself woke up under his own steam.

  He assumed a seated position. He yawned.

  Then he asked:

  “Time is it?”

  “It’s past four,” Germana replies, giving a glance at her wristwatch to check the fact. “You’ve been asleep for some time.”

  “It was good, that risotto with peas,” he stammers.

  Germana smiles.

  “Really?”

  “Better than good! One could tell it was cooked by you.”

  “Lord, I can believe it. My mother, poor thing, never adds enough butter. But this time I made sure I intervened. For risotto there’s nothing like butter.”

  Silence.

  With her face turned to the thick, almost completed sock, Germana is thinking of the new house where she, her Mario and their four children will take up residence in a fortnight, soon after All Souls’ Day.

  And Mario?

  Mario in the meantime has risen from the sofa, and has walked across the room. Approaching the window which gives on to the garden, he now stands there, gazing out intently. What he is looking at she doesn’t manage to guess. Broad and chubby as he’s become, the conceited fellow, God bless him, he blocks out almost the whole view.

  “I’m just going out for a moment,” he announces calmly, after two or three minutes, without turning round.

  “Where are you going? Into the garden?”

  “The garden, my foot. I’m off to the tobacconist on the Corso Giovecca. I’ve a sudden yen to smoke, if you have to know . . . ”

  Shocked by this revelation, expressed for the most part in dialect, Germana jolts her head up.

  “To smoke!” she exclaims. “Why on earth this strange new fad? You don’t . . . ”

  “In the meantime, would you get yourself ready,” he interrupts her, already on his way. “Can you do it in five minutes? Remember the program begins at a quarter to.”<
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  And he disappears through the door.

  Five, ten, twenty minutes pass. Half an hour passes, an hour, an hour and a half. Two hours. The Pasetti parents, the children and the maid return from Montagnone at going on six. Apart from Alcide, who is sleeping, they are all a bit out of breath. The old folk because of the long walk. The children, who have lovely rosy cheeks, because of all their scampering across the fields. And the girl, who besides is impatient to slope off with her soldier, and seems even to be sweating because she’s had to push the pram from a quarter past two until now.

  The returning party finds Germana ready to go out: in a smart little suit, a hat and high heels. But she’s in tears, standing there at the front door. Through her sobs, she tells how Mario went out two hours ago to buy something to smoke (“To smoke!” both her parents exclaim at once, widening their eyes), but he hasn’t come back.

  “What if something has happened to him?”—Germana keeps on complaining. He went out without changing, in his house jacket. Her heart tells her that something has, has indeed happened to him.

  * Ferrarese dialect for “neanche uno straccio di cadavere”— not even the trace of a corpse.

  Three Apologues

  1.

  IT happened quite some time ago, before the opening of the big motorways. Happened? Well, it’s just a manner of speech, since in reality hardly anything happened.

  We had left Ferrara getting on toward four in the afternoon (it must have been May, or June), unsure as ever which route to take returning to Rome. The Flaminia or the Tiberina? By way of Rimini or of Cesena?

  This time, Val seemed to have a decided preference for the Flaminia.

  “In the first place,” she said, as we entered Argenta, “going via Rimini the cities we have to pass through can be counted on one hand. In the second place, there’s not a single mountain pass.”

  “There’s always the Furlo,” I objected.

  “You surely don’t mean to compare the gorge of the Furlo with the mountain pass at Coronaro!” she replied, appropriating a phrase I immediately and unhappily recognized as my own. “And then,” she went on, “passes or no passes, don’t you remember last year, when we came to Ferrara with the children, how pleasant it was to be able to stop at Nocera Umbra, exactly halfway? Have you already forgotten the trattoria where we had dinner? I still recall the very words you said when we set off again.”

  “Might I know what they were?”

  “You swore that in future, every time we made this journey by car, not only would we always take the Flaminia, on the way there and on the way back, but without fail we should always stop at Nocera Umbra. We wouldn’t be able to find a trattoria like that, or rather an inn with stables like those from Leopardi’s era (those were your very words) in any other place.”

  “I might have said something of the sort,” I muttered.

  “Something of the sort?” Val exclaimed. “Are you seriously saying you don’t remember?”

  I remembered, clear as day. But the fact remained that after having left Ravenna behind us, and by then in view of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, we had come no nearer to a decision.

  Val kept silent. Even I kept my mouth shut. The fork in the road, which would force the decision—to go straight on to Rimini or to curve off right to Cesena—was awaiting us less than a kilometer away.

  But then, having just reached the fork and decisively steered to the right, all of a sudden my tongue was freed.

  If I decided on the Tiberina—I explained to Val—I didn’t do so out of caprice, but for a good reason. It was only just five o’clock now. If I put my foot down, we could get over the Mount Coronaro Pass to San Sepolcro well before dark: giving us the chance, should we be so inclined, to have a proper, an instructive look at The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca.

  “And the old inn with its stables from Leopardi’s era can go to hell!” I added by way of conclusion.

  “So it can go to hell now,” Val sighed with bitterness, as though by abandoning the Flaminia in favor of the Tiberina I had given the umpteenth guilty proof of the flightiness and inconstancy of my character, if not, by implication, also of my ever weaker attachment to her and to the family.

  Having sped past the hairpin bends of the Coronaro Pass, well before dark as I’d foreseen, the San Sepolcro plain lies all before us. There’s plenty of time to take a coffee and a tea (I have the coffee, Val the tea) and once again to see the Piero fresco.

  Our tea and coffee drunk, we enter the old assembly room, at the end of which the rustic Christ, with his calm, terrifying gaze, invites those passing tourists in the mood to stray over the threshold and set aside, at least for a moment, their anxious frivolity. And so, about half an hour later, when we resume our journey, it’s already dark.

  I turn the headlights on and in a pensive, gloomy mood drive on along the big, unrutted road that leads to Città di Castello.

  “What’s wrong?” Val happily enquires. “Are you tired?”

  “No,” I reply. If I admit being tired, I can hardly object to her replacing me at the wheel till we reach Perugia, where we’ve decided to stop for supper.

  At the foot of the hill on which Perugia lies I stop at a service station to fill up the tank.

  I leave the car, walk a few steps across the huge, shadowy court, interspersed at regular intervals with pairs of petrol pumps, standing rigidly side by side like policemen, and bordered on three sides by the black countryside. My gaze is drawn up toward the bright lights of the city.

  Should we eat up there in Perugia just a few minutes away? I wonder. Or wait till we get to Todi, or even Narni?

  I think of Todi, of Narni, of their ill-lit alleys cut into the medieval rock hard as diamond, of their darkness, their silence. And as the idea of stopping in Perugia seems to me every moment more absurd, even loathsome, as if Perugia had not been Perugia but rather an ever-proliferating metropolis like Paris, London, New York, or especially like Rome; at the same time I dream that at Todi or else at Narni we might find a good place to eat, perhaps even to sleep. Perchance to sleep! Still—I blather on to myself—how can anyone born in a medium-sized city of the Po Valley, still in possession of their own detached house there, return to Rome without a feeling of anguish? Good God, how can people like us, in the middle of the night, cross the monstrous bridge over the Tiber, the one with the lanterns and the filthy great eagles, beyond which extends the enormous, shapeless concrete hive where we’ve chosen to bring up our children?

  Now determined, I turn back to the car. With her head half in, half out of the window, Val is observing me closely.

  “After all,” she says, signaling with her chin toward a low rectangular construction which rises like an oblong box on the opposite side of the court from the road, “after all, we could just as well eat here as anywhere else.”

  How odd that I hadn’t noticed it before. It’s true. That thing is a restaurant. And suddenly, who knows why, I feel almost happy.

  We sit facing each other outside on the terrace where, in front of the television, not yet switched on, a dozen or so small tables have been placed. We keep up a sort of mutual sulkiness. Though by now, it’s a struggle. Even Val, it’s not hard to tell, is having quite a job sustaining it.

  It feels like we’re on board some small, hyper-modern boat, freshly launched from the boatyard, waiting to set sail, though still moored in the port, at the edge of the breakwater. On deck everything is new. The television hoisted onto its aluminium perch; the paper tablecloths, paper that pretends to be linen; the espresso machine extraordinarily aerodynamic, gleaming in the interior through the glass walls; the wan, sidereal light emitted by the neon tubes: everything here, by its very nature, seems to speak only of the future, of those “evil days ahead,” clean, functional and germless, which we’ll not live to see and which will not remember us.

  But then, later, drawn to the television which in the meantime had been turned on, here they are: the occupants of those invisible rust
ic houses round about, emerging from the unbroken, surrounding darkness to sit in silence at the stainless-steel tables, all evidently in their customary places. My beef-steak and Val’s omelette confiture do not disconcert them. Once seated, they calmly order their usual: a quarter-liter of wine, a beer, a chinotto, or a fizzy lemon. So that, in the end, it’s just as if we had stopped at Todi or at Narni. Or even as if, having chosen the Flaminia rather than the Tiberina, we’d found ourselves at Nocera Umbria, guests of that inn with the stables which perhaps dated back to the era of Leopardi, to which less than a year before I’d sworn eternal loyalty.

  Fanned by the light breeze, and by now unconcerned about having to cross that inauspicious bridge over the Tiber at two or three in the morning, we stay on there till after eleven.

  At the end of the news, I touch Val’s hand.

  “Should we go, then?” I propose, for once gently, fraternally.

  “Yes, why not?” she immediately consents with a kindly smile.

  And already, ahead of me, she’s on her way to the car.

  2.

  I REACHED Naples toward evening. High in the air, the silver forms of the captive balloons, positioned in a semicircle to defend the port, caught the last light of day. In the alleys bustling with a happy crowd in shirtsleeves, the barbers had hoisted improbable signs in English saying “Barber Shop.”

  Although I had been to Naples twice before, the first visit in 1937 to compete in the Littoriali della Cultura, and the second the following year for the sports Littoriali, when the American military jeep I’d been aboard dropped me off in the Maschio Angioino neighborhood, I almost immediately realized that finding the house of C, the Finance Undersecretary, would be far from easy. After asking directions quite a few times and much slogging back and forth, I found myself around nine o’clock with my suitcase on my shoulder climbing up to the heights, which on one side overlooked Piazza dei Martiri on a steep little street zigzagging between terraces that had been turned into vegetable gardens. Every now and then I stopped: to catch my breath and to gaze at the Municipal Gardens and the Chiaia shoreline, by this hour thickly strewn with lights. I could clearly recognize both of these landmarks, but wondered if I had ever been up here before. I was almost sure I hadn’t.