The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (13 page)

We had gone past it repeatedly in the last few days on our bikes, but without ever stopping. There was the exact point of the garden wall - Micol now said, showing it to me with her finger-where she used to prop up the ladder; and there were the notches (“yes, sir, notches!”) which she used when, as sometimes happened, the ladder wasn’t available.

“Don’t you think we ought to put up a small commemorative plaque here?” she asked me.

“I expect you’ve already got the inscription worked out.

“More or less: ‘Here-escaping the vigilance of two enormous ugly dogs. . . .’ ”

“Hey, stop. You were talking about a small plaque, but I’ve got a feeling this inscription would need a stone the size of the Victory Bulletin one. The second line’s too long.”

So we quarrelled over it. I played the part of the pigheaded interrupter, and Micol, raising her voice and behaving babyishly, accused me of my “usual pedantry”. It was obvious-she cried-that I
must
have suspected her intention of not even mentioning me in her inscription, and so, out ofpurejealousy, I was refusing to listen to her.

Then we calmed down. Once more she began talking to me about when she and Alberto were children. If I really wanted to know the truth, both she and Alberto had always felt enormously envious of people like me who were lucky enough to go to state schools. Did I believe her? They even got to the point of waiting impatiently for exam time each year, just for the fun of going to school themselves.

“But why, if you liked going to school so much, were you always taught at home?” I asked.

“Papa and Mama, Mama above all, just wouldn’t hear of school. Mama’s always had an obsession about germs. She said schools were made just to spread the most frightful diseases, and it was never the slightest use Uncle Giulio trying to make her see it wasn’t true, every time he came here. Uncle Giulio used to tease her; but although he’s a doctor, he believes in medicine only in a very relative sort of way, in fact he believes in the inevitability and usefulness of illness. As you can imagine he didn’t get much of a hearing. from Mama, who has practically never put her nose outside the door since poor Guido, our older brother who died before Alberto and I were born, in 1914. Later on we rebelled a bit, of course; we both managed to go to the university, and even skiing in Austria one winter, as I think I’ve already told you. But when we were children what could we do? I often escaped (Alberto didn’t; he’s always been very much quieter than me, very much more obedient). But one day I stayed away rather too long, wandering around on the city walls with a gang of boys I’d made friends with, who gave me rides on the bars of their bikes, and when I got home I found Mama and Papa in such despair that ever since (because Micol’s a good sort really, she’s got a heart of gold!), ever since then I decided to be good, and never escaped again. The only relapse was in June 1929, in honour of you, kind sir!”

“And to think I imagined I was the only one!” I sighed.

“Well, if you weren’t the only one you were certainly the last. And besides: I never asked anyone else to come into the garden!”

“Honestly ? ”

“Quite honestly. I always looked in your direction in the synagogue. . . . When you turned round to talk to Papa and Alberto your eyes were so blue! In my heart I’d even given you a nickname.”

“A nickname? What was it?”

“Celestino.”

“Che
Jece per viltade ilgran rifiuto
. . .”* I stammered. [
* “The coward spirit of the man who made/The great refusal”: Dante,
 
Hell
 
(translated by Dorothy Sayers). The reference is to Pope Celestine V.]

“Exactly!” she exclaimed, laughing. “In any case, I think that for a while I actually had just the least little thing about you!”

“And then?”

“Then life came between us.”

“But what a notion, fixing up a synagogue all for yourselves. Why was it: still scared of germs?”

“Well . . . sort of . . .” she said.

“What d’you mean, sort of?”

But I couldn’t get her to confess the truth. I knew perfectly well why professor Ermanno had asked permission to do up the Spanish synagogue for himself and his family, in 1933: it was the shameful, shameful and grotesque occasion when the Party was opened to all comers, that decided him. But she kept saying that once again the determining factor had been her mother’s wishes. The Herreras in Venice belonged to the Spanish school. Her mother, her grandmother Regina and her uncles Giulio and Federico had always been terribly keen on the family traditions. So Papa, to please Mama . . .

“But why have you now come back to the Italian synagogue?” I objected. “I wasn’t there on the evening

of Roshashana: it’s three years since I set foot in the synagogue. But my father, who was there, described the scene in the minutest detail.”

“Oh, don’t worry, your absence has been very much observed, Mr. Freethinker!” she replied. “By me, too.”

Then she grew serious again:

“Well, why not . . . we’re all in the same boat now. I think myself that at this point, staying there on our own and making all those distinctions still would be pretty ridiculous.”

Another day, the last day, it started to rain, and while the others went to the
Hiitte,
playing cards and ping-pong, the pair of us, careless of a soaking, ran half-way across the park to shelter in the coach-house. The coach-house was at present functioning only as a coach-house, Micol had told me. At one time, though, halfofit had been made into a gym, with poles, ropes, balancing boards, rings, wall bars, etc.: all with the sole object of allowing her and Alberto to be well prepared for the yearly physical education exam as weU. Certainly the lessons professor Anacleto Zaccarini, who’d been pensioned off for some time and was over eighty (imagine!), gave them twice a week weren’t terribly serious. But they were fun anyway, possibly more fun than any of the others. Micol never forgot to take a bottle of Bosco wine into the gym. And old Zaccarini, his red nose and cheeks growing gradually more and more purple, drank it slowly to the very last drop. Sometimes, when he left on winter evenings, he actually seemed to send out a glow of his own.

It was a long low building of dark brick, with two side windows, strongly barred, an overhanging tile roof, and its walls almost completely hidden by ivy. Not far from Perotti’s barn and the squarish glass of a greenhouse, you approached it through a wide, carefully painted green gate that faced in the direction of the big house, away from the Wall of the Angels.

We stopped for a while outside it, leaning against the gate. The rain was pouring down in long oblique lines on the lawns, on the great green clumps of trees, on everything. It was cold. Teeth chattering, we looked around. The spell in which the season had so far been strung was irreparably broken.

“Shall we go in?” I asked at last. “It’ll be warmer inside.”

Inside the enormous room, at the end of which, in the half light, there gleamed the top of two pale polished gymnasium poles that reached the ceiling, an odd smell hung about: a mixture of petrol and lubricating oil, old dust and citrus fruits. It was a gorgeous smell, Micol said at once, noticing me sniffing it curiously. She liked it a lot as well. And she showed me, up against one of the side walls, a tall set of shelves in dark wood, loaded with large round yellow fruit I had never seen before, bigger than oranges and lemons. Grapefruit, put there to ripen, she explained to me: grown in the greenhouse. Hadn’t I ever eaten them?-she asked me, taking one and offering it to me to smell. What a shame she hadn’t got a knife to cut it in two “hemispheres”. Its juice had a hybrid flavour, like that of oranges and lemons. Withjust a touch ofbitterness, besides, that was all its own.

The middle of the coach-house was taken up with two vehicles, side by side: a long grey Dilambda*  
* A type of Lancia car.] 
and a blue carriage, the shafts of which, standing on end, were only slightly lower than the gym poles behind it.

“We don’t use the carriage any more now,” said Micol. “The few times Papa has to go into the country he goes by car. And so do Alberto and I, when we have to go away: he to Milan and me to Venice. It’s that everlasting Perotti who takes us to the station. He’s the only one here who can drive (and he’s a ghastly driver), apart from Alberto. I can’t, I haven’t got my licence yet. But I’m going to get it, I really must make up my mind to get it next spring, provided they don’t get it into their heads to make difficulties about that as well. . . . The trouble is it simply gulps down petrol, the huge old thing !”

Then, going up to the carriage, which looked hardly less shining and efficient than the car:

“Recognize it?” she asked.

She opened a door, got in, sat down: and then, tapping the cloth of the seat beside her, invited me to do the same.

I climbed up and sat down on her left. And no sooner had I sat down than, rolling slowly on its hinges by pure force of inertia, the door slammed shut on its own with a dry, precise click, like a trap.

The rain beating on the roof of the coach-house was no longer audible. We really seemed to be in a little parlour: a small, stifling parlour.

“How beautifully you keep it,” I said, without managing to control a sudden emotion that was reflected by a slight tremor in my voice. “It still seems new. The only thing missing are the flowers in the vase.”

“Oh, Perotti still puts those in, when he goes out with my grandmother.”

“So you do still use it!”

“Not more than two or three times a year, and then only to take a few turns round the garden.”

“And what about the horse? Still the same one?”

“Yes, the same old Star. He’s twenty-two. Didn’t you sec him at the end of the stable the other day? He’s half blind now, but harnessed in here he still looks pretty . . . frightful.”

She burst out laughing, shaking her head.

“Perotti’s got a real mania about this carriage,” she went on harshly, “and it’s mostly to please him (he hates and despises cars: you can’t imagine how much!) that we occasionally let him drive my grandmother around a bit. Every ten days or a fortnight he comes in here with buckets of water, sponges, doeskin, and rug-beaters; and that explains the miracle, that’s why the carriage, especially when you see it in the half light, still doesn’t look too bad.”

“Too bad?” I protested. “Why, it looks brand new !”

She snorted crossly.

“Don’t talk nonsense, for heaven’s sake!”

Moved by some unforeseeable impulse, she had shifted abruptly away from me, and was crouched up in her corner, gazing frowningly ahead, her features pinched by an expression of curious spleen.

For a few minutes we stayed like that, in silence. Then, without changing her position, clasped round her sun-burnt knees as if she were feeling very cold (she was wearing shorts and a cottonjersey, with a pullover knotted round her neck by the sleeves), Micol went on talking.

“Perotti spends so much time and elbow grease on this wretched old ruin,” she said. “No, believe me: here, where it’s practically dark, you might think it’s a miracle, but outside, in daylight, there’s no getting away from it, you can see any number of flaws straight away: the varnish has gone in places, the spokes and hubs of the wheels are worm-eaten, and the cloth on this seat (you can’t see it now, but I guarantee it) is worn out, hi places it’sjust like a spider’s web. And so I wonder what’s the point of all Perotti's
struma*
?
* “Effort”: Ferrarcse dialect.]
 Is it worth it? The poor old fellow keeps trying to get Papa to let him re-varnish the whole thing, restoring it in the way he wants it; but Papa keeps putting it off as usual, and won’t make up his mind. . . .”

She was silent; and moved slightly.

“But look at the canoe,” she went on, and, through the glass of the windows our breath wasjust beginning to fog up, pointed to a dim, skeletal, oblong outline up against the wall opposite the one taken up by the grapefruit shelves. “Just look at that little canoe instead, and please admire the honesty, dignity, and moral courage with which it’s managed to draw all the right conclusions from its own complete loss of function. Things die, too, you know. And so, if they too have to die, weU there it is, it’s so much better to let them go. That has much more style about it, apart from everything else, don’t you agree?”

Endlessly, during the winter, spring and summer that followed, I turned back to what had happened (or rather hadn’t happened) between Micol and me in old Perotti’s beloved carriage. If, that rainy afternoon on which the luminous Indian summer of 1938 suddenly ended, I had at least managed to speak-I told myself bitterly-things might have gone differently for us. Ifl’d talked to her, kissed her: it was then, when everything was still possible-I never stopped telling myself-that I ought to have done it! And I forgot to ask myself the essential question: whether, in that supreme, single, irrevocable moment-a moment that perhaps had decided my life and hers-I was really capable of trying to do or say anything at all. Did I, for instance, already know that I was
really
in love? No, the fact was I didn’t yet know it. Neither then, nor later, not for at least another two weeks; that is, some time after the bad weather, which had now settled down on us, had scattered our group.