The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (18 page)

We talked of a great many things, the two of us (Alberto preferred to listen), but, quite obviously, of politics most of all.

Those were the months immediately after the Munich agreement, and this, Munich and its results, was in fact the subject we most often talked about. What would Hitler do, now that the Sudeten territories were happily incorporated into the Reich? Where would he strike now? I wasn’t too pessimistic, and just for once Malnate agreed with me. According to me, the agreement France and England had been forced into at the end of the crisis last September wouldn’t last very long. Yes, Hitler and Mussolini had made Chamberlain and Daladier abandon Benes’s Czechoslovakia to its fate. But what next? If Chamberlain and Daladier were swapped for younger, tougher characters (see the advantage of the parliamentary system !-I exclaimed), France and England would soon be ready to show their teeth. Time was on their side, I said.

But all we had to do was talk about the war in Spain, which was now at its last gasp, ormention the U.S.S.R. in any way, for Malnate’s attitude to the western democracies, and so to me, considered ironically as their representative and champion, to become far less accommodating right away. I can still see his large dark head poking forward, his forehead gleaming with sweat, his eyes fixed on me in the everlasting unbearable effort at half moral and half mawkish blackmail he so easily slipped into, while his voice took on a low, warm, persuasive, patient tone. Would I please tell him-he asked-who’d really been responsible for Franco’s revolt? Wasn’t it the French and English right wing who’d not only tolerated it at the start, but had actually bolstered and applauded it later? Just as the way the French and English had behaved, quite correctly but in fact ambiguously, allowed Mussolini to gobble up Ethiopia in ’3 5, so in Spain it was above all the wicked wavering of Baldwin, and Halifax, and of Blum himself, that turned the balance in Franco’s favour. No good blaming the U.S.S.R. and the International Brigade-he said, growing gentler-no good saying it was the fault of Russia, who’d become every idiot’s whipping-boy, that things had got into such a state. The truth was quite different: only Russia had realized right from the start what the Duce and the Fuhrer were like, only Russia had foreseen clearly that the pair of them would inevitably get together, and so in good time had acted accordingly. Whereas the French and English right wings, who undermined democracy as every right wing in every country and at any time had always done, had always regarded Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany with ill-concealed friendliness. The reactionaries of France and England might find the Duce and the Fuhrer rather uncomfortable, perhaps, a bit rough and a bit much; but in every way preferable to Stalin, who, as everyone knew, had always been the devil himself After grabbing and annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia, Germany was starting to weigh in on Poland. Now if France and England had been reduced to the point where all they could do was watch what was happening and lump it, it was perfectly plain: the full responsibility for their present impotence fell on those fine, upstanding, decorative gents in tails and top-hats-whose way of dressing, at least, responded to the nostalgia for the nineteenth century so many literary decadents went in for-who now governed them.

But what really stirred Malnate into argument was what had been happening in Italy during the past few decades.

It was obvious, he said, that to me, and basically even to Alberto, fascism was nothing but a sudden inexplicable disease that had crept up on a healthy organism, or rather, to use a favourite expression of Benedetto Croce’s, “your common master” (at this point Alberto glumly shook his head, but Malnate took no notice), an invasion by the Hyksos. To us the liberal Italy of Giolitti, Nitti, Orlando, and even that of Sonnino, Salandra and Facta, had been perfectly fine and holy; a kind of golden age, to which we should return, if we could, with everything exactly as it had been. But we were wrong, as wrong as could be ! Evil hadn’t crept up on us suddenly. On the contrary, it went back a very long way, right back to the early years of the Risorgi-mento, which was in fact achieved, practically speaking, without the people, the real people, having a hand in it at all. Giolitti? It was
our
Giolitti, and Benedetto Croce too, both of them ready to swallow the bitterest pills so long as it stopped the advance of the working classes, it was they we must thank for the fact that Mussolini managed to survive the crisis after the Matteotti affair, when everything around him seemed to be crumbling and even the king actually wavered; yes, it was they, our dream liberals, who gave Mussolini time to draw breath. Less than six months later he repaid them by suppressing the freedom of the press and dissolving the parties. Giovanni Giolitti retired from political life and slunk off to his estates in Piedmont; Benedetto Croce went back to his beloved philosophical and literary studies. But there were people who, though very much less guilty, in fact not guilty at all, had paid far more dearly. Amendola and Gobetti were beaten to death; Filippo Turati died in exile, far from his home in Milan where, a few years earlier, he’d buried poor signora Anna; Antonio Gramsci had ended up in gaol (he’d died last year in prison, didn’t we know?); Italian workers and peasants, together with their natural leaders, had lost every effective hope of social redemption and human dignity, and, for nearly twenty years now, had been vegetating and dying in silence.

It wasn’t easy for me to stand up to these ideas, for several reasons: first of all because Malnate, who had breathed in socialism and anti-fascism from his earliest years at home, had a political culture that far surpassed mine; secondly because the role he tried to press me into-that of the decadent or “hermetic” literary man, as he put it, whose politics were based on Croce’s books -seemed to me inadequate, didn’t correspond to my real personality, and so had to be rejected before we even started any discussion. As a result I preferred to keep silent, smiling vaguely and ironically. I bore it, and smiled.

As for Alberto, he was silent as well, of course: partly because, as usual, he had nothing to put forward, but mainly to allow his friend to be cruel to me, which, it was only too obvious, he liked best of all. If you shut three people up in a room to argue for days on end, two of them will almost inevitably gang up on the third. However that may be, Alberto seemed ready to take anything from Giampi, even being classed with me, very often, just to show he was on Giampi's side, and sticking by him. It was true: Mussolini and his chums were working up to some frightful outrages and insults against the Jews-Malnate would say, for instance; you couldn’t say whether last July’s notorious Racial Manifesto, drawn up by ten so-called “fascist scholars”, was more shameful or ridiculous. But admitting that-he went on-could we tell him how many “Israelite” anti-fascists there had been in Italy before 1938? Pretty few, he was afraid, a tiny minority, since even in Ferrara, as Alberto had told him several times, a very high percentage of them had been fascist party members. I myself had taken part in the Littoriali della Cultura*
*
 
Fascist cultural competitions for university students.
 in ’36. Was I already reading Croce’s
History of Europe
at that time? Or did I wait for my revelations till the following year, the year of the
Anschluss
and the first brushes with Italian racialism?

I bore it and smiled, sometimes protesting, but more often not; in spite of myself overcome by his frankness and sincerity, which were a little too rough and pitiless, admittedly, a little too
goi-
this was how I put it to my-self-but underneath really compassionate because really concerned with equality, with brotherliness. And when Malnate, leaving me alone for a moment, turned on Alberto, and good-naturedly accused him and his family of being, “after all”, dirty landowners, the evil exploiters of undercultivated estates, and aristocrats, what’s more, harking back nostalgically to medieval feudalism, so that it wasn’t, after all, so unfair for them to pay the penalty a bit for the privileges they’d so long enjoyed (under Malnate’s abuse Alberto laughed till he cried, and kept nodding, to say he was perfectly ready to pay), it was not without secret pleasure that I listened to him thundering against his friend. The child of the years before 1929, who, walking beside his mother along the cemetery paths, had heard her call the Finzi-Continis’ immense solitary tomb a “perfect horror”, rose all of a sudden from the depths of me and applauded nastily.

At times, though, Malnate seemed almost to forget my presence. This was when he recalled the years in Milan with Alberto, the friends they had then had in common, male and female, the restaurants they had been to together, evenings at the Scala, football matches at the Arena or at San Siro, winter trips to the mountains or the Riviera. They had both belonged to a “group”, membership of which, it appeared, required only one thing: intelligence, and scorn for every kind of provincialism and affectation. Those were the days, the days of their youth, of Gladys, a music-hall dancer who appeared at the Lirico now and then, and for a time was Giampi’s mistress; and then took a fancy to Alberto, who simply refused to hear of it, and ended up by dropping them both. Oh, Gladys wasn’t at all bad, Malnate said: gay, a good mixer, not realy out for what she could get, and appropriately, just as she should be, a tart.

“I never understood why Alberto pushed her off poor Gladys,” he said one evening, suddenly winking at me. And then, turning to Alberto:

“Be brave now! It’s more than three years ago and we’re nearly three hundred kilometres from the scene of the crime: so why not put your cards on the table at last?”

But Alberto parried him, blushing; and as far as Gladys was concerned the cards never got on the table, either then or later.

He liked the work he’d come to do in Ferrara-Mal-nate often said-he liked Ferrara, too, as a town, and couldn’t understand how Alberto and I could consider it a kind of tomb or prison. Of course, our situation was quite special. But our mistake, as usual, was to think we belonged to the only persecuted minority in Italy, without realizing there were plenty of others, lots of other minorities who suffered as much as we did, or more. What about the workmen in the factory where he worked, for instance, what did we think they were: unfeeling brutes? He knew some who’d not only never joined the fascist party, but, being socialists or communists, had been beaten up and given the “castor oil treatment” several times, and still they had carried on undaunted, sticking to their ideas. He’d gone to some of their secret meetings, and been slightly surprised to find there, apart from workmen and peasants who’d come specially all the way from Mesola or Goro, three or four of the best-known lawyers in town: which proved that even in Ferrara the entire middle class hadn’t supported fascism, and not every part of it was guilty. Had we ever heard of Clelia Trotti? We hadn’t? Well, she was an ex-primary school teacher, a little old woman who, as far as he’d heard, had been the guiding spirit oflocal socialism, and still was, because although she was over seventy there wasn’t a single meeting she didn’t take part in. In fact, that was how he’d met her and got to know her. Of course you couldn’t expect much from her sort of socialism; humanitarian, Andrea-Costa type, it was. But what ardour, what faith, what hope she had! Even physically, especially her blue eyes, those of a one-time blonde, reminded him of signora Anna, Filippo Turati’s companion, whom he’d known very well as a boy in Milan, in about 1922. His father, a lawyer, had spent nearly a year in prison with the Turatis, in ’98. He was an intimate friend of them both, and was one of the few people who dared visit them in their modest flat in the Galleria on Sunday afternoons. And he, Giampi, had often gone along there with him.

No, for heaven’s sake: Ferrara wasn’t at all the kind of prison you’d think it, from hearing us. Of course if you looked at it from the industrial zone, shut up, as it appeared, within the circle ofits old walls, you might easily get an impression of isolation, especially in bad weather. But around Ferrara there was the countryside, rich, alive, and busy; and at the end of that, only forty kilometres east, was the sea, with empty beaches fringed with marvellous forests ofholm oaks and pines: the sea, yes, which is always a great thing to have near. But apart from that, the town itself, if you got right inside it as he had decided to do, if you looked at it closely, without prejudice, had, like any other place, such treasures of honesty, intelligence and goodness, that only those who were blind and deaf, or else shrivelled, could fail to know or refuse to acknowledge them.

At first Alberto kept saying he would soon be off to Milan. Then gradually he stopped talking about it, and the question of his degree thesis imperceptibly became, to me and possibly to Malnate as well, something embarrassing we must skirt cautiously.

He didn’t talk about it; and we realized he wanted us to drop it too.

As I have said, he took part in our talks very rarely, and when he did, it was always off the point. He was on Malnate’s side, there was no doubt at all about that. But as a stooge, without ever taking the smallest initiative. He never took his eyes off Malnate for an instant, happy if he triumphed, worried if I seemed to win. Apart from that he was silent; all he did was make the odd exclamation, giggle a bit, clear his throat. “Oh, that’ s ricli! . . .” ; “All, but you know, in a way . . . ” ; “Just a minute-let’s look at this calmly . . .”.