A similar recognition occurs when the narrator vents his frustration at the dire political climate on his little sister, Fanny, and then suddenly relents, seeing her abject and in tears: ‘The suntan from the seaside had already vanished; the skin of her face had returned to its pallid, almost diaphanous state, so much so that the blue veins in her temples showed.’ The image makes us startlingly aware of just how vulnerable and unprotected she is.
In a novel that charts the momentous exclusion of the Jewish community, the decision to put another victim of ‘excommunication’ centre-stage is a significant act of imaginative sympathy. Before this novel, as far as I’m aware, there are no examples in Italian fiction of a homosexual figure as protagonist. Dr Fadigati is not portrayed, any more than the narrator himself is, as a saintly victim. He is a dreamy bourgeois with a taste for working-class life. He stares longingly from the train at the workers in the small stations, stands in the dark of the stalls at the cinema, to the chagrin of the well-off who are seated in the circle, and frequents the proletarian zones of the city in the evenings. His speech is a stilted mix of medical truisms and slightly old-world courtesies. His taste in art is that of an informed and mild aesthete – he has a passion for opera, especially Wagner, and is both a collector and connoisseur of recent Italian art – signs of a slightly too effusive, even bohemian, character to his fellow middle-class observers, but which are considered, until his life is put under scrutiny, as harmless at worst and at best charming foibles. His literary taste is conventional – he shares with the narrator’s father a devotion to the lyric poetry of Carducci. He quotes the Iliad in Greek, Catullus in Latin. Another, more revealing, literary reference comes to light during one of those train journeys in which he fondly reminisces about his own student days in Padua, the garden of his lodgings, and makes reference to a nineteenth-century American short story. Though this is unnamed, he clearly has in mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappuccini’s Daughter’, set in Padua. It’s a curious choice, and somewhat recherché for an Italian professional in the 1930s. The story has indeed certain oblique parallels with Fadigati’s own fate – as the protagonist falls in love with a young woman who, due to the evil experiments of her botanist father, bears in her person the fatal poison of the plants in the garden she attends. It’s a moment of unguarded expansiveness on Fadigati’s part, one for which he pays dearly: Deliliers cuts off Fadigati’s reminiscences with spectacular brutality and subsequently this beautiful youth will poison the doctor’s life. Another strange parallel occurs in the introduction to the tale in which the author speaks of the invented teller, a certain De l’Aubépine (French for ‘hawthorn’) and characterizes his narrative style:
His writings, to do them justice, are not altogether destitute of fancy and originality; they might have won him greater reputation but for an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions. His fictions are sometimes historical, sometimes of the present day, and sometimes, so far as can be discovered, have little or no reference either to time or space.
This otherworldly and allegorical narrative manner is, one might think, exactly the opposite of Bassani’s own chosen mode which, by his own account, keeps so close to the actualities of time and place. With this reference, though, it is as if Bassani were also laying claim to a kind of allegorical truth for his tale, and one which his readers would not want to deny him.
Translator’s Note
I am very indebted to Sarah Coward and Sarah Hopkins for their invaluable editorial advice, and I’m most grateful to Antonella Anedda, Giorgia Sensi, Luca Guerneri, Rachel Owen and Fiona Whitehouse for the improvements they have suggested.
Jamie McKendrick
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This translation first published 2012
Copyright © Copyright 1991, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. Milano
Translation and Afterword copyright © Jamie McKendrick, 2012
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1 The Florence football ground was named after the Fascist Giovanni Berta, who in 1921 was killed in a violent encounter with the Communists in the city. After the war it was renamed Stadio Artemio Franchi.
2 SPAL (Società Polisportiva Ars et Labor) was the principal Ferrara football club, founded in 1907 and reconstituted in 2005.
1 GUF (Gruppi Universitari Fascisti) was an organization which enrolled Fascists among university students as a kind of ideological elite.
2 ‘Deputato’: elected member of the lower house of the Italian parliament, the upper being the ‘Se
nato’.
1 An Italian game played on a pocketless billiards table with nine balls, using the hands not cues.
2 Italian cultural, artistic and sporting events organized by the National Fascist Party and the GUF between 1932 and 1940.
3 Benedetto Croce (1886–1952) was a philosopher, and briefly a politician, who supported the Fascist Party in its early stages but then openly criticized it. Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) was also a philosopher, who had an early association with Croce. He became the Minister for Public Education under Mussolini and ghost-wrote the latter’s essay ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’ (1932).
1 Antonio Salandra (1853–1931) was an Italian politician who as Prime Minister took Italy into the First World War, despite a parliamentary majority in favour of neutrality, and who later supported Mussolini.
2 Anthony Adverse is a very long American novel by Hervey Allen published in 1933, which the lawyer is reading in translation. It was made into a film in 1936.
3 Bassani refers to ‘paranze’ and ‘bragozzi’: the first, one-mast trawlers with sails, the second, restricted to the Adriatic, smaller two-mast vessels.
1 ‘l’azzurra visïon di San Marino’: the line is from ‘Romagna’, a poem by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912).
2 Rachele Guidi (‘la donna Rachele’) married Mussolini in 1915, and remained with him despite his various mistresses. It was Claretta Petacci who was with him when he was captured and both were killed by Italian partisans in 1945.
3 Ferrara dialect: ‘Poor thing.’
1 Agostino Gemelli (1878–1959). See Afterword. Likewise for the Jesuit biweekly magazine Civiltà Cattolica, founded in 1850.
1 Ferrarese dialect: ‘Get lost, you idiot!’
2 The first line of the Iliad: ‘Sing, Goddess, of rage, of Achilles’ rage.’
3 Warm south-west wind, whose regional name ‘garbino’, or ‘garbin’, is elsewhere called the ‘libeccio’.
4 A three-volume work, published between 1878 and 1889, by the Italian poet and Nobel prizewinner Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907).
1 Ferrarese dialect: ‘What a fool.’
2 Sciagura (meaning ‘calamity’) is the nickname of the character Carlo Aretusi, who also appears elsewhere in Il romanzo di Ferrara, in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and most prominently in the short story ‘Una notte del ’43’.
3 Nino again uses a dialect term, ‘sfattísia’, to describe the letter. The word has an echo of the Italian term for ‘defeatism’, but here suggests an attitude of total dismissal.
1 The exit from Sunday Mass was, at least until recently, a social event in Italian towns not unlike the evening ‘passeggiata’, though usually, as here, a chance more specifically for men and boys to eye the women leaving church.
1 An Italian football club based in Vercelli, Piedmont.
2 A quote from Catullus (Carmina 3): ‘illud, unde negant redire quemquam’ (‘to the place from whence they say no one returns’).
3 In the context, the Italian proverb that Fadigati uses – ‘Chi vivrà vedrà’ (‘Who lives will see’) – is slightly more ominous.
1 TIMO (Società Telefonica Italia Meridionale) was one of the regional telephone companies that were finally subsumed in the national company SEAT.
1 The Palazzo del Viminale in Rome has housed the Italian Ministry of Home Affairs since 1925.
Giorgio Bassani, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles
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