The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles

He looked towards the kitchen doorway to assure himself that Elsa, the cook, was not about to enter. Then, opening his blue eyes wide in excitement, he leant forward over the table with the evident intention of spilling the beans.

  He had no success. My mother was at the ready and put the unfolded telegram beneath his nose.

  ‘We too have some important news,’ she said, and smiled proudly. ‘What do you think of that?’

  ‘Ah … it’s from Ernesto,’ my father replied, distractedly. ‘When does he arrive? So he’s finally made up his mind!’

  ‘What do you mean – when does he arrive!’ my mother shouted, offended. ‘Haven’t you read it? It’s tomorrow evening, isn’t it?’

  She grabbed the telegram from his hand. Sulking, she began to fold it up again carefully.

  ‘It’s as if it wasn’t to do with your own son!’ she grumbled with lowered eyes, while she replaced the telegram in her apron pocket.

  My father turned to look at me. Enraged, he was calling me to his aid as a witness. But I kept silent. There was something that stopped me intervening, stopped me trying to reconcile this petty, childish quarrel.

  ‘Come on then, let’s hear,’ my mother finally yielded, although with the air of doing so mainly for my benefit.

  18

  The news my father wanted to give us was the following.

  A half-hour earlier, at the Credito Italiano bank, he had happened to meet the lawyer Geremia Tabet who, as we well knew, had not only always been ‘privy to the secrets’ of Ferrara’s Fascist Party, but also notoriously enjoyed the ‘friendship’ and the good opinion of His Excellency Bocchini, the Chief of Police.

  While they were leaving the Credito together, Tabet had taken my father by the arm. Recently he had been in Rome on business – he confided to him – which gave him the opportunity to ‘peep for a moment over the threshold of the Viminale’.1 Given the times and the circumstances, he feared that His Excellency’s private secretary would not have announced him. On the contrary. The Prefect Dr Corazza had immediately introduced him in the great hall where the ‘boss’ was working.

  ‘My dear fellow!’ Bocchini had exclaimed, seeing him enter.

  He had stood up, walked halfway across the big room to meet him, had warmly shaken his hand and made him sit down in an armchair. After which, without too much preamble, he had confronted the much-publicized question of the Racial Laws.

  ‘Don’t let this disrupt your own peace of mind, Tabet,’ he had said in those words, ‘and instil, I beg you, calmness and confidence in as many of your co-religionists as is possible. In Italy, I’m authorized to guarantee to you, legislation on racial matters will never be passed.’

  The newspapers, it’s true, were still speaking ill of the ‘Israelites’ – Bocchini had continued – but only for ulterior motives, only for reasons of foreign policy. That had to be understood. In these last months, Il Duce had found himself faced with the ‘un-a-void-ab-le’ necessity of making the Western democracies believe that Italy was now joined in two-step with Germany. What topic then would be more persuasive to this effect than a bit of anti-Semitism? We should keep calm. It would be enough for a countermand from Il Duce himself for all the useless watchdogs like Interlandi and Preziosi – the Chief of Police held them in the most extreme contempt – to stop barking from one day to the next.

  ‘Let’s hope!’ sighed my mother, her big brown eyes turned to the ceiling. ‘Let’s hope Mussolini decides to give it soon, his countermand!’

  Elisa entered with the oval plate of pastasciutta, and my father fell silent. At this moment, I slid my chair back from the table, and, standing up, moved towards the little radiogram. I switched it on. Then off. At last I went to sit in the wicker armchair near by.

  Why did I not share the hopes of my parents? What was it in their enthusiasm that rubbed me up the wrong way? ‘Good God …’ I said to myself, clenching my teeth. ‘As soon as Elisa leaves the room, my father will start on one of his usual speeches.’

  I was desperate, absolutely desperate. And certainly it was not because I thought the Chief of Police had been lying, but because my father was suddenly so happy, or rather because he seemed so anxious to be happy again. So was it this, then, that I couldn’t bear? – I asked myself. I couldn’t bear him being happy? That the future should smile upon him as it had once, as it had before?

  I took the newspaper out of my pocket and, having given a glance at the front page, I moved directly on to the sports coverage. Despite trying with all my might to concentrate my attention on the report of the Juventus–Bologna match that had been played in Turin, just as I had heard Cenzo crying out, and had ended with Bologna’s ‘resounding defeat’, I kept finding my thoughts drawn elsewhere.

  My father’s joy – I was thinking – was that of a little schoolboy unjustly thrown out of class, who, at his master’s call returns from the empty corridor where he had had to remain a short stretch in exile, and finds himself suddenly, beyond all his hopes, permitted back into the classroom: not only absolved, but declared innocent and fully rehabilitated. And yet, in the end, was it not right for my father to rejoice just like that child? As for myself, I felt no such joy. The sense of solitude that during the last two months had never left me, at that very moment became, if that were possible, even more acute: absolute and definitive. From my exile, I would never return. Never.

  I lifted my head. Elisa had left, the kitchen door was again properly closed. But still my father remained silent, or almost so. Bent over his plate, he confined himself every now and then to exchanging some pointless remarks with my mother, who smiled at him with gratification. Long shafts of early-afternoon sunshine transfixed the gloom of the breakfast room. They shone through from the adjoining drawing room, which was overflowing with light. When he had finished eating, my father would retire there to sleep, stretched out on the leather sofa. I could just see him there – set apart, enclosed, protected. As though in a luminous pink cocoon. With his ingenuous face offered up to the light, as he slept wrapped in his cape …

  I went back to my newspaper.

  And there, at the bottom of the left-hand page, opposite the sports reports, my eyes fell on a middling-sized headline.

  It read:

  WELL-KNOWN FERRARESE PROFESSIONAL

  DROWNED IN THE WATERS OF THE PO

  NEAR PONTELAGOSCURO

  I believe that for a moment or two my heart stopped. And yet I had not understood; it still hadn’t got through to me.

  I took a deep breath. And then I understood, yes, I had already understood before I began to read the little half-column beneath the headline, which did not at all speak of suicide, it should be understood, but, according to the style of the times, only of misfortune (it was not acceptable for anyone, in those days, to kill themselves: not even for the long dishonoured, who had no reason whatsoever to remain on the earth …)

  I did not finish reading it, however. I lowered my eyelids. My heart had begun again to beat regularly. I waited for Elsa, who had reappeared for a moment, to leave us alone once more, and then said in a lowered but abrupt tone:

  ‘Dr Fadigati is dead.’

  Afterword

  Giorgio Bassani’s fiction has a tenacious adherence to the facts of his own life, time and place. ‘I believe,’ he commented in one interview, ‘that I’m one of the few, the very few, contemporary writers who places dates in the context of what he writes.’ Although he confesses to having invented some streets and squares, he wants the Ferrara of his stories to be ‘una città vera’ – and credible in its detail, an ‘image as real and concrete as possible’. The narrator of The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, he goes on to say, is not the author himself as he was when a student, but is a ‘part’ of himself: ‘At that time I was almost like that, but not exactly that.’ Representation of time, place and self is not something given, however: it must be constructed.

  Because Bassani’s arrival at
the threshold of adulthood also coincided with a critical moment for the Jewish community he was part of, it results in a double awakening of a consciousness of self and of the world. It is no coincidence that nearly all of his novels and short stories, though they found their first completion some twenty years later, hark back to this period of formation. They are works of history, civic and personal. His fiction, it could be said, is fact by other means.

  But those other means are crucial: they allow the time to be told not as an objective narrative but through various lenses, gold-rimmed or unadorned. The term ‘faction’ has emerged in the last few years to delineate a kind of crossover of factual and fictive writing, a blurred borderline where actual characters may be seen within a fictional setting, essentially historical fictions. To some extent this story, and much of Bassani’s other fiction, could be seen as precursors for this genre. And yet, however attentive and convincing his backdrop and accurate his portrayal of the times, Bassani does not sacrifice any of the imaginative autonomy of his fiction. Its verisimilitude is a triumph of art as well as of memory.

  Published in 1958, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles is set during the unnamed narrator’s first year at Bologna University. It follows the school incidents of the novel Bassani would write in 1964 – Dietro la porta (Behind the Door) – and the period it describes overlaps with the latter part of his next novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), which narrates episodes from childhood, school and university. The first and shortest of all Bassani’s novels, formally it occupies the borderland between short novel and novella. Although, as the title suggests, its focus is on the wearer of those occhiali d’oro, the older Dr Athos Fadigati, its narration has a golden aura of early adulthood, of the daily train journeys from Ferrara to Bologna, and its denouement occurs in the Adriatic seaside town of Riccione, a traditional summer resort for the Ferraresi. As with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, any youthful idyll is disrupted by the events of the time. The period of youth the story describes is not anyway one of innocence, or at least quite soon the experiences of adulthood break in upon it – the narrator for instance, towards the end of the story, is seen exiting a brothel, his friend Nino Bottecchiari is deliberating whether to throw over his incipient Socialist principles to take a job with the Fascist Party as a Cultural Attaché and, least innocent of all, Eraldo Deliliers, their idolized sporting companion, instead of pursuing his promising career as a boxer, has embarked on a career as ruthless parasite.

  The book studies the predicament of the outsider in diptych form – the intertwined fates of the homosexual doctor and the young Jewish narrator at the point, in 1937–8, that Italian Fascism begins to follow the precepts of Nazi racism. Dr Fadigati is not rejected by Ferrarese society because he is a homosexual, so long as his affairs are kept discreet, although he is the target of jokes and innuendoes, and treated with growing contempt by the young university students he befriends on the daily train journeys to and from Bologna. He becomes a social outcast only when his homosexuality breaks out of the shadows, and ironically this occurs not by his own choice but because Deliliers wishes to boastfully display his conquest. Although it is also conceivable that Fadigati’s isolation is not so much precipitated by his own actions as by the increasing prejudice and intolerance of the times. Running parallel with Fadigati’s ‘fall’ is the vicious government-run propaganda campaign in the press against the Jewish community which prepares the way for the passing of the Racial Laws in 1938. Fadigati’s odd, almost masochistic acceptance of his public humiliation is in contrast to the narrator’s rage at his own exclusion, his determination to ‘respond’ to hatred ‘with hatred’, and yet their position relative to the society of Ferrara is subtly parallel. One of the triumphs of this short novel is the way in which these connections emerge not explicitly but psychologically, not as political discourse but as narrative, although all the more forcefully for that.

  One small but significant example of the fusion of the historical and the fictive occurs when Signora Lavezzoli, defender of Mussolini and Hitler and virulent castigator of Dr Fadigati’s homosexuality, in a conversation with the narrator’s family makes a telling reference to an article by Padre Gemelli ‘in the last issue of the Civiltà Cattolica’, a Jesuit magazine founded in the 1850s and still current:

  The theme of the article was the ‘ancient and vexed question juive’. According to Padre Gemelli – the signora continued – the recurrent persecutions to which the ‘Israelites’ had been subjected everywhere in the world for almost two thousand years could not be explained other than as a sign of celestial ire. And the article concluded with the following question: is it permitted for a Christian, even if his heart recoils, as one can understand, from every idea of violence, to venture a judgement on historic events through which the will of God is so clearly manifest?

  Padre Gemelli is not an invented representative of the Church but a real figure: a Franciscan priest, Rector of the Catholic University of Milan and President of the Pontificio Accademia delle Scienze. He was also a keen vivisectionist whose scientific researches involved trepanning the skulls and cutting the vocal chords of ownerless cats, without, as one commentator notes, the kindness to animals we would associate with the founder of his Order. However, Bassani’s account neatly sums up his traditional, anti-Judaic position, which extended in some of his remarks to include the biological, anti-Semitic concept of ‘blood’; indeed he was a signatory of the 1938 Manifesto of Racist Scientists. During this period, he also reported two students from the university, who were gaoled for five years, for anti-Fascist activities. Though he briefly lost his job as rector, as a result of an investigation into his collusions with the Regime after the war, he was soon reinstated, on what seems to have been the fabricated evidence of his assistance in the escape of a large number of Jews and political prisoners – an escape bravely effected by the work of another priest, Carlo Varischi. Gemelli was to hold his position as rector until his death, and various schools and an important hospital in Rome are still named after him.

  Gemelli’s first recorded racist outburst occurs in 1924: the suicide of the professor and writer Felice Momigliano allows him to cherish the hope that along with ‘Positivism, Socialism, Free Thought and with Momigliano’, ‘all those Jews who continue the work of the Jews who crucified Our Lord’ would die, and preferably ‘before dying, repentant, they should ask to be baptized’.

  In a more unctuous style, very much along the lines of this reference in the novel, is a speech he gave in January 1939 at Bologna University:

  Without doubt tragic and painful is the situation of those who cannot be a part, both because of their blood and their religion, of this magnificent fatherland; a tragic situation in which we see once again, as in many other centuries, the manifestation of that terrible sentence which the deicidal people have brought upon themselves and because of which they wander solitary in the world, incapable of finding the peace of a homeland, while the consequences of their horrible crime follows them everywhere and in every age.

  Although Signora Lavezzoli is mistaken, and Gemelli did not publish this in Civiltà Cattolica, her account is a perfectly accurate representation of his views. Moreover, although in 1938 the magazine distanced itself from racist ideology in a circumspect article by its editor Enrico Rosa SJ, the argument still concluded with the recommendation of forms of segregation for the Jewish community, and the magazine’s history furnishes many examples of anti-Semitism. One of its contributors, M. Barberi SJ, the year before, considering ‘The Jewish Question in Hungary’, laments what he sees as the corrosive presence of Jews in that country: ‘all, or nearly all the Jews of the intellectual or ruling class are not only unbelievers, but freethinkers, or revolutionaries, or Masonic organizers … in a word, their law in life (and thus their practical moral law) is worldly success by whatever means’. The article is strongly reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s infamous words four years earlier in After Strange Gods: ‘reasons
of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’. Both writers belong to that wing of clerical anti-Judaism that made common cause with racist ideology, even while denying that this was the case.

  This kind of pervasive discourse, which has taken me more than a page to trace, Bassani has managed to convey with astonishing economy and accuracy within a few lines, while at the same time furthering our understanding of Signora Lavezzoli and of the narrator’s bleak and growing unease. It is a chilling moment. The narrator gets up ‘without too many courtesies’, leaving the signora’s and the padre’s menacing phrase, ‘la volontà di Dio’, to resound on the terrace of the Grand Hôtel and in the reader’s ear.

  This incident is followed soon after, back in Ferrara, by the narrator’s conversation with his friend Nino Bottecchiari. Nino’s well-meaning sympathy for the Jewish community fails to prevent him from displaying a singular insensitivity, which the narrator reluctantly defines as ‘goyische’. The experience is almost more galling for him than the sanctimonious prejudices of Signora Lavezzoli. It is only with Dr Fadigati, whom some time later he meets in the city at night, that a frank exchange on this issue is possible. Fadigati actually understands what ostracism and exclusion feel like, because he is experiencing them himself, despite his own responses being far more meek and self-accusing. The scene allows all the implicit connections between the two to emerge. And its setting outside a brothel, the banal conversation overheard from within, the menacing group of youths, one of them urinating on a wall, the beseeching mongrel who has attached herself to Fadigati, the frozen fogbound streets all compose a masterly study of the city continuing its normal everyday life, but with a subtle tinge of the squalid, the nightmarish, the infernal.

  Into this grim scene, however, the mongrel’s presence brings the light and warmth of a creaturely affection. Fadigati arrives scolding the dog that has been following him and spends a disturbed night attending to her. The dog makes him reflect morosely on the instinctual life denied him but, with great pathos, shows both his isolation and his compassion. The city itself has become hostile and vicious, a different kind of creature, as we see in the youths who seem to consider both the narrator and the doctor as homosexuals, and therefore prey. In this context there is nothing sentimental about the narrator’s relations with Fadigati, or about Fadigati’s with the dog – it concerns the survival of something without which life has no value. It’s an inspired episode in a story that pays such attention to history, for the dog’s needs are immediate and unhistorical, and are a poignant reminder of how fragile all existence is.