Having arrived close to Montagnone, we heard from behind us the sound of a light trotting. We turned round. It was the same mongrel as before, who had caught up with us, panting.
She stopped, happy to have tracked us down by scent in that sea of fog. And laying back her long, tender ears, whimpering and festively wagging her tail, she was already once more performing, mainly in honour of Fadigati, her pathetic little displays of devotion.
‘Is it yours?’ I asked.
‘Not likely. I found her this evening near the aqueduct. I stroked her and, Lord knows why, she took it to heart! From then on I haven’t been able to shake her off.’
I noticed her udders were fat and pendulous, swollen with milk.
‘She has some little ones, see?’
‘It’s true!’ exclaimed Fadigati. ‘You’re absolutely right!’
And then, turning to the dog:
‘You wretch! Where have you left your babies? Aren’t you ashamed to go out on the town at this hour? Unnatural mother!’
Once more, the dog flattened herself with her belly on the ground a few inches from Fadigati’s feet. ‘Beat me, kill me if you want!’ she seemed to be saying. ‘It’s only right, and besides I like it!’
The doctor knelt to stroke her head. In a fit of genuine passion, the creature kept on licking his hands. She tried to reach his face with the sudden upward ambush of a kiss.
‘Calm down, will you? Calm down …’ Fadigati kept repeating.
Still followed or led by the mongrel, we resumed our stroll. By this stage we had drawn near to my house. When she was in front, the dog stopped at every crossing as though fearful of losing us again.
‘Will you look at her!’ said Fadigati, pointing. ‘Perhaps one ought to be like that, able to accept one’s own nature. But on the other hand how does one accomplish that? Isn’t the price too high? There’s a great deal of the animal in all men, and yet can we give in to it? Admit to being an animal, and only an animal?’
I broke into loud laughter.
‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘It would be like asking: can an Italian, an Italian citizen, admit to being a Jew, and only a Jew?’
He gave me a humiliated look.
‘I understand what you’re saying,’ he replied after a while. ‘In these times, believe me, I’ve many times thought about you, and your family. But, allow me to tell you that if I were in your –’
‘What should I do?’ I interrupted him heatedly. ‘Accept that I am what I am? Or would it be better to mould myself into what others want me to be?’
‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t,’ he replied quietly. ‘My dear friend, if being what you are, is what makes you so much more human – you wouldn’t be here keeping me company otherwise! – why reject it, why rebel against it? My situation is different, the exact opposite of yours. After all that happened last summer I can’t bear myself any longer. I can’t, I shouldn’t go on. Would you believe that I can’t even bear to shave in front of the mirror. I could at least dress in a different fashion! All the same, could you imagine me without this hat … this overcoat … these glasses, this uniform of respectability? And yet, dressed up like this, I feel so ridiculous, grotesque, absurd! Eh, no, “inde redire negant”2 couldn’t be more apt. There’s nothing to be done for me, don’t you see?’
I kept silent. I thought of Deliliers and Fadigati, one the executioner, the other the victim. The victim as usual forgave and gave his consent to the executioner. But not me: Fadigati was wrong about me. To hatred I could never respond in any other way than with hatred.
As soon as we had reached the entrance to my house, I took the keys from my pocket and opened the door. The mongrel stuck her head in through the crack as if she wanted to enter.
‘Out!’ I shouted. ‘Away with you!’
The creature whined with fear, quickly taking refuge between the legs of her protector.
‘Goodnight,’ I said. ‘It’s late, and I really must go.’
He returned my handshake with great effusiveness.
‘Goodnight … Keep well … And all best wishes to your family,’ he repeated several times.
I crossed the threshold. And since, smiling and holding up his arm in salutation, he still had not made his mind up to go away – and seated on the pavement even the dog was looking up at me with an interrogative air – I began to shut the double-door.
‘Will you phone me?’ I asked lightly, before completely closing it.
‘Who knows?’ he said, smiling somewhat mysteriously through the last gap. ‘Time will tell.’3
16
He called me up two days later, at lunchtime. We were just sitting down at the table. Since she was the only one not yet seated, it was my mother who answered. She leant her head out from the little telephone cupboard, searching me with her eyes. ‘It’s for you,’ she said.
‘Who is it?’
She came towards me, shrugging her shoulders.
‘A gentleman … I didn’t catch his name.’
Distracted, impractical, forever in a dream, she was never very good at managing this kind of thing, and since we had returned from the seaside, she was worse than ever.
‘All you need do is ask,’ I replied irritably. ‘It’s not that difficult.’
I got up with a sigh of annoyance. But a secret quickening of the pulse had already warned me who it might be.
‘Yes, who is it?’
‘Hello, it’s me, Fadigati,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. Were you already having your lunch?’
I was surprised by his voice. In the receiver it sounded sharper. Even his Venetian accent was more marked.
‘No, no … sorry, could you hold on a moment?’
I opened the door again, thrust my head out as my mother had, and without saying who was on the line, nodded to my mother, with the attempt at a smile, to cover my soup bowl with a plate. Fanny was quick to forestall her. Astonished, immediately jealous, my father stared at me, lifting his chin as if to ask ‘what’s going on?’ But I had already shut myself up again in the dark little room.
‘Please continue.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ the doctor said with a faint laugh from the other end of the line. ‘You asked me to call you, and so … but I’ve called at a bad time, tell the truth!’
‘Not at all,’ I protested. ‘Quite the opposite – it’s a pleasure to hear from you. Would you like to meet?’
I hesitated briefly, which he was sure to have noticed, and then added: ‘Listen, why not come round to visit us. I know my father would be really happy to see you. What d’you think?’
‘No, but thank you … you’re very kind … it’s so kind of you! No … perhaps later on, it would be a real pleasure … provided that … it would be wonderful!’
I did not know what to say. After a rather long pause, during which nothing reached me through the receiver except a heavy, heartfelt sigh, it was he who began to speak.
‘Speaking of meeting, that dog followed me home, do you remember?’
For a moment I could not understand him.
‘What dog?’
‘You know, the dog the other night … the unnatural mother!’ he laughed.
‘Oh, that one … the mongrel.’
‘Not only did she accompany me all the way home,’ he continued, ‘but when we got to the door there, in Via Gorgadello, there was no refusing her, she absolutely had to come in. She was hungry, poor thing! From the cupboard I scraped together a scrag-end of salami, some old bread crusts, a rind of cheese … You should have seen the appetite with which she bolted it all down! But that’s not all. After that, just imagine it, I had to take her with me into the bedroom.’
‘What, to bed as well?’
‘Well, almost … we arranged ourselves with me on the bed, and her on the floor in a corner. Every now and then she woke, started whining with a tiny voice, and went to scratch
at the door. ‘Lie down!’ I shouted at her in the dark. For a while she’d be good and keep quiet, for a quarter of an hour, half an hour. But then she’d start again. A hellish night, I can tell you!’
‘If she wanted to go, why didn’t you let her?’
‘What can I say? Laziness. It annoyed me to have to get up, take her all the way down … you know how it is. But as soon as it was obvious what she was after, I quickly did what she wanted. I got dressed and accompanied her outside. That’s it, it was me accompanying her this time. It struck me that she might not know the way home.’
‘You came across her near the aqueduct, isn’t that right?’
‘Exactly. But listen to this. Right at the end of Via Garibaldi, at the corner of the Spianata, at a certain point I heard someone crying “Vampa!” It was a baker’s-boy, a dark-haired lad on a bicycle. The dog immediately threw herself into his arms, and I’ll spare you the details of all the hugs and kisses. In short, great reciprocal celebrations. Then off they went, he on his bicycle, she trotting behind.’
‘You see what women are like?’ I joked.
‘There’s some truth in that!’ he sighed. ‘She had already gone some distance, they were about to enter Via Piangipane, when she turned to look at me – can you believe it? – as if to say: “Sorry to dump you, old man, don’t be upset, but I really have to go off with this young fellow here.”’
He laughed on his own, not in the least embittered.
‘You’ll never guess though,’ he added, ‘why all through the night she’d wanted to go.’
‘Don’t tell me the thought of her little ones had kept her awake.’
‘You’ve guessed right. Exactly that – the thought of her little ones! Do you want the proof? In my room, in the corner I wanted her to stay in, I later found a large puddle of milk. During the night she’d been suffering from the so-called surfeit of milk: that was why she was so restless and kept whining. The spasms she must have been suffering only she could tell, the poor thing!’
He kept on talking: of the dog, of animals in general and their feelings, which are so like those of people – he said – even if ‘perhaps’ they’re more straightforward, more directly subject to the laws of nature. As for me, by then I was feeling an intense discomfort. Worried that my father and mother, undoubtedly all ears, would have worked out whom I was talking to, I confined myself to monosyllabic replies. I was hoping, in this way, to encourage him to cut it short. But no luck. It seemed as though he was unable to detach himself from the receiver.
It was Thursday. We arranged to see each other the following Saturday. He would phone me just after lunch. If the weather was fine, we would take the tram, go to Pontelagoscuro and see the Po. After the last rains the river must have reached close to the flood-warning level. Just imagine what it looks like!
But finally he wound up:
‘Goodbye, my dear friend … keep well,’ he repeated several times, emotionally. ‘Good luck to you, and to your family …’
17
It rained all Saturday and Sunday. Perhaps also for that reason I forgot Fadigati’s promise. He did not phone me, nor did I call him: but only out of forgetfulness, I would like to stress, not from any deliberate decision. It rained without a moment of truce. From my room I watched the trees in the garden through the window. The torrential rain seemed to mount a particular assault on the poplar, the two elms and the chestnut tree, from which it gradually tore the last leaves. Only the black magnolia, at the centre, intact and dripping in the most exuberant manner, seemed to visibly enjoy the downpour that was battering it.
On Sunday morning I helped Fanny go over her Latin homework. She had already started again at school, but was having difficulties with the grammar. She showed me a translation from Italian that was chock-full of mistakes. She just did not understand, and it infuriated me.
‘You’re an idiot!’
She burst into 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. Her straight hair fell gracelessly over her sobbing shoulders.
Then I hugged and kissed her.
‘Won’t you tell me why you’re crying?’
I promised her that after lunch I would take her to the cinema.
But I left alone. I entered the foyer of the Excelsior.
‘Circle?’ asked the ticket-seller, who recognized me, from the height of her pulpit.
She was a shapely woman of uncertain age, with dark curly hair, and wearing a thick layer of powder and make-up. How long had she been there, lazily surveying us from under her heavy lids, a grotesque urban idol? I had always seen her there: from when my mother had sent us, as children, to the cinema with the maid. We usually went on Wednesday afternoons, as there was no school on Thursday; and every time we would go up to the circle.
The plump white hand, with its lacquered nails, proffered me the ticket. There was something very assured, almost imperious, in the gesture.
‘No, could you give me a ticket for the stalls?’ I replied coldly, not without having to overcome an unexpected feeling of shame. And at that very moment I had an image of Fadigati.
I showed the ticket to the usher, slipped into the stalls, and despite the crowd quickly found a seat.
A strange feeling of unease kept drawing my eyes away from the screen. Every now and then I thought I had spotted his homburg hat, his overcoat and his shining lenses in the smoke and darkness, and I waited for the interval with increasing anxiety. Finally the lights came on. And then, in the light – having looked round everywhere, in the rows of seats where green-grey uniforms stood out most numerously, or in the side aisles, by the heavy curtains draped at the doorway, or even up there in the circle, filled to the rafters with young men returned from the match, with women of all ages in hats and furs, with army or Militia officers, with old or middle-aged men all more or less dozing off – then, in the light, I came to realize at each suspected sighting that it was not him, that he was not there. No, he was not there, I told myself, trying to feel reassured. But why on earth should he have been? In Ferrara, after all, there were three other cinemas. And had he not always preferred to watch films after dinner?
When I left, towards seven thirty, it was no longer raining. Torn into strips, the mantle of clouds allowed zones of the starry sky to be seen. A cold, tense wind had rapidly dried the pavements.
I crossed the Listone and took the Via Bersaglieri del Po. From the corner of Via Gorgadello I looked round towards the five windows of his apartment. All shut, all dark. I then tried to phone him from the public TIMO1 booth in Via Cairoli. But nothing, silence, no reply.
I tried again a little later from home, and again from the public phone booth the next morning, Monday: always with the same result.
‘He must have gone away,’ I told myself on this last occasion, stepping out of the booth. ‘When he gets back, he’s bound to let me know.’
I descended Via Savonarola in the sunny quietness of one o’clock in the afternoon. A few people were scattered along the pavements; from open windows came snatches of radio music and cooking smells. Walking, I raised my eyes every so often to the perfect blue sky against which were sharply etched the profiles of cornices and guttering. Still wet with the rain, the roofs around the small square of the church of San Girolamo seemed more brown than red, almost black.
Exactly in front of the entrance to the Maternity Hospital I bumped into Cenzo, the newsvendor.
‘How is SPAL doing this year?’ I asked him, stopping to buy the local Padano. ‘Is there a chance of making it into Serie B?’
Perhaps suspicious I was making fun of him, he gave me a sideward glance. He folded the paper, handed it to me along with the change, and went off, shouting the headlines at the top of his voice.
‘Bologna’s resounding defeat at Turiiiin! SPAL ends up beaten in Car
piii!’
I inserted the key into the lock of the door to our house, and could still hear his distant voice echoing through the deserted streets.
Upstairs, I found my mother happy and excited. My brother, Ernesto, had sent a telegram from Paris, telling them that he was returning to Italy that very evening. He would be staying in Milan for half a day, tomorrow, but was meaning to be in Ferrara by supper time.
‘And has Papà heard?’ I asked, slightly vexed by her tears of joy, and without ceasing to examine the telegram’s yellow sheet.
‘No. He went out at ten o’clock. He had to go to the Town Hall first, then to the bank, and the telegram arrived at about eleven thirty. How happy he’ll be! Last night he could hardly sleep. He kept saying, “If only Ernesto were home as well!”’
‘Has anyone phoned for me?’
‘No … or, wait a moment, yes they did …’
She screwed up her face in the effort to remember, while looking to the left and the right: as though the name of the person who had called might be written on the walls or the floor.
‘Oh, yes … it was Nino Bottecchiari,’ she finally recalled.
‘And no one else?’
‘I don’t think so. Nino made a point of asking you to phone him back … Why not go to see him sometime? He seems such a good friend.’
We sat down at the table, just the two of us – as Fanny was out with a school friend of hers who had invited her to lunch. My mother spoke of Ernesto. She had already started worrying. Should he enrol for a course in Law or rather Medicine? In any case English, which by now he knew to perfection, would without doubt be of great use to him, in his studies, his life …
That day my father was later than usual. When he arrived, we had already started on the fruit.
‘Great news!’ he exclaimed, throwing wide the breakfast-room door.
He let his full weight fall into the chair with a satisfied ‘Aah!’ He was tired, pale, but radiant.