He began then to tell me how a week before he had received a letter from Deliliers in Paris, no less. It’s a pity he didn’t have it with him. He meant to show it to me, though: it was truly worth my while. He’d never before held in his hands such an arrogantly dismissive document,3 and he couldn’t decide whether the most fitting response was revulsion or laughter.
‘How disgusting!’ he exclaimed.
He began to discourse in detail on the letter: on its tone, and of the heavy insults directed at all of us ex-travelling companions in those journeys back and forth between Ferrara and Bologna, myself included. To tell the truth, he specified, laughing, rather than insult us, the big jerk was trying to make fun of us. We were all good little mummy’s boys, provincials, pampered bourgeoisie …
‘Do you remember what he was planning?’ he went on. ‘Sooner or later he was going to pull off a real coup, after which he’d dedicate himself exclusively to boxing. Just imagine it. Instead he must have found himself some new, well-heeled pansy, perhaps this time of the international variety. But this time he’ll play it out as long as possible, I’m sure of that, or at least until he too has been squeezed completely dry. So much for boxing!’
He then went on to speak about France. If it hadn’t been the complete disaster it was – Fascism pronounced a thoroughly unfavourable judgement on France that he fully shared – it would have put in place an absolute ban on adventurers of his kidney.
‘As for us, in Italy,’ he concluded, suddenly becoming almost serious, ‘d’you know what we ought to do with people like that? Avail ourselves of the full powers permitted by the law and put them up against a wall, and there’s an end to it. But Italy, could you call it a society … ?’
He had finished.
‘Wonderful,’ I commented, calmly. ‘I suppose he refers to me as a nasty Jew.’
He was hesitant about answering. In the half-light of the entrance hall I saw him blush.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, turning to take me by the arm. ‘The Mass will be over by now.’
And he dragged me, using some force, towards the smaller exit of the Archbishop’s Palace: the one that, exactly at the corner of Via Gorgadello, opens on to the Piazza Cattedrale.
14
The midday Mass was about to finish. A small crowd of boys, of young men, of layabouts, idled as always in front of the Duomo’s entrance.
I watched them. Until a few months before, I would never have missed the Sunday congregation leaving San Carlo and the Duomo at half past twelve, and even today – I reflected – it wasn’t as if I’d missed it.1 But would this suffice for me? Today was different. I wasn’t down there, in among the others, in the usual part-mocking, part-anxious wait for the Mass exodus. Leaning against the doorway of the Archbishop’s Palace, stuck in a corner of the piazza – the presence of Nino Bottecchiari, if anything, only increased my bitterness – I felt set apart, irremediably an intruder.
In that moment the raucous cry of a newsvendor resounded.
It was Cenzo, near enough a halfwit, of an indefinable age, cross-eyed, slightly lame, always on the go walking the pavements with a fat bundle of dailies under his arm, and treated by the entire city, and sometimes even by me, to hearty thumps on the back, affectionate insults and sardonic requests to forecast the imminent destiny of SPAL, and so on.
Scuffing his big, nailed soles on the paving stones, Cenzo steered himself towards the centre of the piazza with his right hand holding aloft an unfolded newspaper.
‘Latest measures of the Great Council taken against the Jows!’ his cavernous voice hurled out with indifference.
And while Nino remained in a most uneasy silence, I felt in me, with inexpressible repugnance, the first inklings of the Jew’s ancient, atavistic hatred for everything that was Christian, Catholic, in a word goyische. Goy, goyim: what a sense of shame, what a humiliation, what a loathsome falling-off: to think in these terms. And yet I had already managed this – I told myself – become exactly like any Jew whatsoever from Eastern Europe who had never lived outside his own ghetto. I thought of our own ghetto, of Via Mazzini, of Via Vignatagliata, of the blind alley Torcicoda. In a near enough future, they, the goyim, would once more have forced us to swarm there, in the narrow, twisting lanes of that wretched medieval quarter from which, when all was reckoned up, we had emerged only some seventy or eighty years ago. Piled one on top of the other behind the gates like so many frightened beasts, we would never again manage to escape.
‘It annoys me to speak of it,’ began Nino without looking at me, ‘but you have no idea how much what’s happening distresses me. My uncle Mauro is pessimistic, there’s no point in concealing it from you: on the other hand that’s to be expected – he has always hoped things would go from bad to the worst possible. Myself, I don’t believe it. Despite appearances, I don’t believe that Italy will go down the same road as Germany with these policies against your people. You’ll see that it will all burst like a soap bubble in the end.’
I should have been grateful that he brought up the subject. In the end, what else could he have said? And yet I wasn’t. While he was speaking, I barely managed to mask the annoyance his words provoked in me, and the tone especially, the disappointed tone of his voice. ‘It will all burst like a soap bubble in the end.’ Could you be any clumsier, more insensitive, more obtusely goyische than that? I asked him why, in contrast to his uncle, he was optimistic.
‘Oh, we Italians are too buffoonish for that,’ he replied, without showing he was aware of my irony. ‘We may imitate the Germans in some things, even the goose-step, but not the tragic sense they have of life. We’re just too old, too sceptical and worn out.’
Only at this point must he have figured out, from my silence, how inopportune what he had just said was, how inevitably ambiguous. Immediately the expression on his face changed.
‘And just as well, don’t you think?’ he exclaimed with forced joviality. ‘For all its faults, long live our millennia of Latin wisdom!’
He was sure – he went on – that among us Italians anti-Semitism would never be able to take on a serious, political form, and so take root. The conviction that there was some neat separation between the Jewish ‘element’ and that of the ‘so-called Aryan’ could not be practically feasible in our country – you had only to think of Ferrara, a city that, ‘as regards its social profile’, one could consider more or less typical. The ‘Israelites’ in Ferrara, all or nearly all, belonged to the city’s bourgeoisie, of which they even constituted in a certain sense the centre, the backbone. The very fact that the majority of them had been Fascists, and not a few of them, as I well knew, among its first adherents, showed their unquestionable solidarity and identity with the whole society. Could one imagine anyone more Jewish and at the same time more Ferrarese than the lawyer Geremia Tabet, just to name one figure that springs to mind among the small circle of people (with Carlo Aretusi, Vezio Sturla, Osvaldo Bellistracci, the Councillor Bolognese and two or three others) who in 1919 had founded the first local section of the Veterans’ Fascist Movement? And who could be more ‘one of us’ than old Dr Corcos, Elia Corcos, the famous clinician – so much so that, strictly speaking, his personage could have been perfectly included in the municipal coat of arms? And my father? And the lawyer Lattes, Bruno’s father? No, no: just going through the telephone directory, where the Jewish names inevitably appeared accompanied by their professional and academic titles, doctors, lawyers, engineers, owners of big and small commercial companies, and so on, you’d immediately see the impossibility of putting into effect here in Ferrara a racial policy with any chance of success. That kind of policy could ‘operate’ only if there were more cases like that of the Finzi-Contini family, with their most atypical impulse to segregate themselves and live in a grand, aristocratic house. (Although he himself knew Alberto Finzi-Contini very well, he had never succeeded in getting himself invited to play tennis at their house, on their magnifi
cent private court!) But in Ferrara the Finzi-Continis were exactly that: an exception. And then, weren’t even they following a resurgent ‘historical imperative’, in acquiring the big house in Corso Ercole I, and all their lands, as well as in their way of living apart, just like certain ancient Ferrarese aristocratic families now extinct?
He said all this, and more that I can’t recall. While he was speaking, I did not even look at him. The sky above the piazza was full of light. I had to squint to follow the flight of the doves that crossed it from time to time.
Suddenly he touched my hand.
‘I need some advice,’ he said. ‘The advice of a friend.’
‘Willingly.’
‘Will you be absolutely straight with me?’
‘Of course.’
Then I had to know – he began, lowering his voice – that a couple of days ago he had been approached by ‘that snake’ Gino Cariani, who, without much preamble, had proposed to him that he take on the role of ‘Cultural Attaché’. So far he had neither accepted nor refused the post. He had asked only for a little time to reflect on it. Now, however, he had to make a decision. That very morning, at the caffè, just before I had arrived, Cariani had brought up the topic again.
‘What should I do?’ he asked after a pause.
I pursed my lips, perplexed. But he had already begun another speech.
‘I belong to a “clan” with traditions of which you’re well aware,’ he said. ‘And yet you can be sure that when my father comes to hear that I’ve declined Cariani’s proposal, he’ll put his head in his hands, that’s what he’ll do. And do you think my uncle Mauro will behave any differently? All that’s needed is for my father to ask him to send for me, and he’d be only too happy to oblige, if with no other intention than to free himself from any charge of bias. I can already see his face at the moment he blithely asks me to revoke the decision. I can just hear what he’ll say. Pressing me not to behave like a baby, to think again about it, because in life …’
He laughed, with distaste.
‘Look,’ he added: ‘I have so little faith in human nature, and in the character of us Italians in particular, that I don’t even feel sure about myself. We live in a country, my dear fellow, where the Roman, in its old proper sense, has only remained with us in the form of a raised-arm salute. Which makes even me ask: à quoi bon? At the end of the day, if I were to refuse –’
‘You’d be making a big mistake,’ I interrupted calmly.
He stared at me with a flicker of diffidence in his eyes.
‘You mean that?’
‘Of course I do. I don’t see why you shouldn’t aspire to have a career in the Party, or through the Party. If I were in your shoes … I mean, if I were studying Law like you … I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment.’
I had taken care not to let anything of what I felt show through. The expression on Nino’s face cleared. He lit a cigarette. My objectivity, my disinterestedness, had evidently impressed him.
He thanked me for the advice, releasing into the air a first, dense mouthful of smoke. He’d allow, he said, a few more days to pass before he followed it. He wanted to have a clear view both of himself and how things were. Fascism was without doubt in a state of crisis. But was this a question of something wrong in the system, or with the system? It’s good to get on in life. But how? Was it possible to change things from within, or else … ?
He finished with a vague wave of his hand.
In the next few days – he began again – he would come round to my house to see me. I was a literary figure … a poet … he smiled, trying once more to assume the half-protective, half-affectionate tone, the tone of the politician, that he often used with me. At any rate he would greatly appreciate the chance to go over the whole question with me. We must make an effort to phone, see each other, keep in contact with one another … above all to react!
I sighed audibly.
‘By the way,’ he asked out of the blue, furrowing his brow, ‘when is it you have to do your first exam in Bologna? Oh, no! We’ll have to renew our railway-travel cards …’
15
I saw Fadigati again.
It was on the streets and at night: a humid, misty night about halfway through the following November. Coming out of the brothel on Via Bomporto with my clothes impregnated with the usual scent, I lingered there, in front of the doorway, undecided as to whether I should go home or follow the impulse to take to the city walls in search of some clean air.
The surrounding silence was perfect. From inside the brothel at my back filtered the weary conversation of three voices, two of them male and one female. They were talking about football. The two men were complaining that SPAL, which in the years after the First World War had been a great team, one of the best in northern Italy – in 1923 it had failed by a hair’s breadth to win the First Division Championship: they had just needed to draw their last away match at Pro Vercelli1– had now ended up in Serie C, and each year was struggling even to stay there. Ah, the years of the centrefield player Condrelli, of the two Banfi brothers, Beppe and Ilario, of the great Baùsi, that, yes, that was the great era! The woman only occasionally interrupted. For instance, she said, ‘That’s rubbish, you Ferraresi like sex too much.’ Or ‘The trouble with you Ferraresi is not so much ball control, as talking and watching rather than playing!’ The other two let her speak, but just went on unfazed with the same argument. They must have been old customers, of about forty-five, fifty: veteran smokers. The prostitute was obviously not from Ferrara, but from the Veneto, probably in the vicinity of Friuli.
Lurching over the sharp cobbles of the alleyway, slow, heavy footsteps could be heard approaching.
‘What on earth d’you want? Are you hungry, is that it?’
It was Fadigati. A while before he finally made me out in the thick fog I had recognized him by his voice.
‘You’re just a stupid thing, and filthy too! I’ve nothing to give you, and you know it!’
Who was he speaking to? And why that tone of complaint, drenched in mannered tenderness?
At last he appeared. Haloed by the yellow light of the single street lamp, his plump form loomed out of the vapours. He advanced slowly, inclined slightly to one side and still declaiming. I saw he was leaning on a cane.
He stopped about a yard away.
‘So, then, are you going to leave me in peace, or aren’t you?’
He fixed the creature in the eyes, raising his finger in a threatening gesture. And the creature, a medium-sized mongrel bitch, white with brown spots, made her reply from below, desperately wagging her tail, eyeing him with a watery, fearful gaze, while dragging herself over the cobbles towards the doctor’s shoes. In a moment she would have rolled on her back with her belly and legs in the air, completely at his mercy.
‘Good evening.’
He detached his eyes from the dog’s and looked at me.
‘How are things?’ he said, placing me. ‘Are you well?’
We shook hands. We were standing facing each other in front of the nail-studded exit to the brothel. Good Lord, how he had aged! His sagging cheeks, obscured by a shaggy, grey beard, made him seem in his sixties. From his reddened, rheumy eyelids, you could tell that he was tired, that he had not been sleeping. And yet the gaze from behind his glasses was still lively and brisk …
‘Did you know you’ve grown thinner?’ he said. ‘But it suits you, it makes you look more of a man. You know, sometimes in life just a few months make all the difference. A few months count for more, at times, than entire years.’
The nail-studded door opened, and four or five young men came out: types that might have been from the suburbs, if not from the country. They remained there in a circle to light their cigarettes. One approached the wall beside the entrance to urinate. All of them, including him, kept insistently peering at us.
Passing between the open legs of the young man standing at
the wall, a small snaking rivulet flowed rapidly in descent towards the centre of the alley. The dog was attracted by it. Cautiously she approached it to sniff.
‘It would be better if we went,’ Fadigati whispered with a light tremor in his voice.
We moved away in silence, while at our backs the alley echoed with laughter and obscene taunts. For a moment I was afraid that the little gang would come up behind us. But luckily there was Via Ripagrande, where the fog seemed even thicker. We just needed to cross the street, step up on to the opposite pavement, and I was sure that we would have disappeared from sight, covering our tracks behind us.
We walked on at a slow pace side by side towards Montagnone. Midnight had sounded a good while before, and there was no one to be seen on the streets. Row after row of blind, closed shutters, bolted doors and, at intervals, the almost underwater light of the street lamps.
It had got so late that perhaps we two, Fadigati and I, were the only people left wandering around the city at that hour. He spoke to me with a sad, subdued air. He narrated all his misfortunes. They had dismissed him from the hospital with some perfunctory excuse. Even at the clinic in Via Gorgadello, entire afternoons could pass without the visit of a single patient. For him, it was true, there was no one in the world he had to look after … provide for; he had no immediate hardships as far as his finances were concerned … but was it possible to keep on living like this, in the most utter solitude, surrounded by general hostility? The time wasn’t far off, at all events, when he would have to sack the nurse, make do with a smaller surgery, begin to sell off his pictures. Then perhaps it was best that he should leave at once, try to find work elsewhere.
‘Why don’t you do that?’
‘Of course, you’re right,’ he sighed. ‘But at my age … And then, even if I had the strength and courage to take such a step, do you think it would really make any difference?’