The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (3 page)

This was the way my father talked: especially at Passover, during the long dinners that still took place in our house even after the death of my grandfather Raffaello, which about twenty relations and friends attended; but at Kippur as well, when the same friends and relations came to us to end their fast.

But I remember a Passover supper in the course of which, to the usual criticisms-bitter and general and always the same, and made above all for the pleasure of reviving the old stories of the Jewish community-my father added something new and surprising.

It was in 1933, the year when the Fascist Party was opened to everyone.

Thanks to the “clemency” of the Duce, who suddenly, as if inspired, had decided to open his arms to every one of “yesterday’s agnostics and enemies”, the number of Fascist Party members had risen suddenly to 90 per cent, even in the circle of our Jewish community. And my father, who was sitting there at his usual place at the head of the table, the place in which my grandfather Raffaello had presided for many years with a very different authority and severity, had not failed to welcome the event. The rabbi, Dr. Levi-he said-had been quite right to mention it in his sermon recently at the Italian synagogue, when, in the presence of the highest city authorities-the Prefect, the Federal Secretary, the
Podesta*
the commander of the local garrison-he had commemorated the granting of the constitution.

And yet Papa wasn’t entirely happy about it. In his boyish blue eyes, brimming withpatriotic ardour, I saw a shadow ofdisappointment. So something must be needling him, some small unexpected and unpleasant obstacle.

And, as a matter of fact, having started counting on his fingers how many of us, how many of us
judim
in Ferrara were still “outside”, and having at last reached Ermanno Finzi-Contini, who had never joined the party, it was true, but considering what an important landowner he was, it wasn’t really very easy to see why not; suddenly, as if sick of himself and his own discretion, he decided to tell us about two odd things that seemed to have no connection-he said-but were no less significant for all that.

The first was that when Geremia Tabet, the lawyer, had, as a SansepolcristaJ and intimate friend of the

* The head of the municipal administration under the Fascists.

t This was the Constitution granted in 1848 by Carlo-Alberto, King of Sardinia, to his Piedmontese and Sardinian subjects and then adopted in 1861 by the kingdom ofltaly.

J Those who had become fascists before the March on Rome in 1922 were referred to by this name, which is derived from a meeting held in piazza San Sepolcro in MUan in 1919; in a sense this meeting marked the birth of Italian fascism.

Federal Secretary, gone to Barchetto del Duca just to offer professor Ermanno a membership card, already filled in, it had not only been returned to him, but shortly afterwards, very politely of course, but quite firmly, he had been shown out.

“But how did he get out of it?” someone asked plaintively. “I never heard that Ermanno Finzi-Contini was all that tough.”

“How did he get out ofjoining?” said my father, laughing violently. “Oh, the usual stuff: that he’s a scholar (I’d like to know what the hell he’s working at!), that he’s too old, that he’s never taken any part in politics, etc. etc. Anyway, he was pretty cunning about it, our friend was. He must have noticed Tabet’s black look because suddenly, wham !-he slipped five thousand lire into his pocket.”

“Five thousand lire!”

“Exactly. For the party’s holiday camps of the O.N.B.

* Pretty smart, don’t you think? Listen to what comes next, though.”

And he went on to tell everyone at the table that a few days before professor Ermanno had written to the council of the Jewish community through Renzo Galassi-Tarabini (could he possibly have picked a more hypocritical,
haltot
old humbug of a lawyer than that?) and officially asked permission to restore at his own expense, “for the private and exclusive use ofhis family and of those who might possibly be interested”, the small ancient Spanish synagogue in via Mazzini, which had not been put to religious use for at least three centuries and was now used as a storeroom.

* Opera Nazionale Bahlla: Fascist youth organization.

 t ‘Bigot’ in the dialect of Ferrara Jews.

In 1914, when the child Guido died, professor Er-manno was forty-nine, and signora Olga twenty-four. The child felt ill, was put to bed with a high fever, and fell into a deep torpor right away.

Dr. Corcos was sent for urgently. He examined the child silently, interminably, frowning deeply; then he raised his head abruptly, and looked gravely at the father and then at the mother. He looked at them for a long time, stern and oddly scornful; while under his thick Umberto-style whiskers, already completely grey, his lips tightened bitterly, almost angrily, as they did in desperate cases.

“There’s nothing more to be done,” that look and that face meant to say. But perhaps something else as well. That he himself, that is, ten years before (and perhaps he spoke of it that same day, before leaving, or else, as certainly happened, only five days later, turning to my grandfather Raffaello as they slowly followed the imposing funeral) that he, too, had lost a child, his own Ruben.

“I have known this torture myself, I know what it is to see a child offive die,” Elia Corcos said suddenly.

Head drooping, hands on the handle-bars of his bicycle, my grandfather Raffaello was walking beside him. He seemed to be counting the cobble-stones of

Corso Ercole I d’Este, one by one. At these highly unusual words from his sceptical friend, he turned in surprise to look at him.

And, indeed, what did Elia Corcos himself know about it? He examined the child’s inert body for a long time, made his own gloomy prognosis of what was likely to happen, and then looked up into the stony eyes of the parents: the father an old man, the mother still a girl. How could he possibly get down into their hearts, and read them? And who else ever would, in the future? The inscription on the giant tomb in the Jewish cemetery (seven lines not very noticeably cut and coloured on a plain rectangle of white marble), was to say only:

Alas,

Guido Finzi-Contini
(1908-1914) choice form and spirit your parents were ready to love you more and more and not weep for you so soon

More and more. A soft sob, that was all. A load on the heart, not to be shared with anyone else on earth.

Alberto was born in 1915, Micol in 1916: my contemporaries, pretty nearly. They were not sent to either the Jewish primary school in via Vignatagliata, where Guido had been without even finishing the first form, orlater to the state high school, G.
B. Guarini,
the melting-pot of all the most promising youngsters in town, Jewish and non-Jewish, and so just as hallowed a choice. Instead both Alberto and Micol were taught privately, with their father occasionally interrupting his own solitary studies in agriculture, physics, and the history of the Jewish communities in Italy, to keep a close eye on their progress. These were the foolish but in their way generous early years of fascism in Emilia. Every action, all behaviour, was judged-even by people who, like my father, liked to quote Horace and his
aurea mediocritas-
through the rough sieve ofpatriot-ism or defeatism. Sending your children to the state schools was considered patriotic, on the whole. Not sending them was defeatist: and so, as far as anyone who did send them was concerned, definitely offensive.

But, although they were kept so much apart, Micol and Alberto always kept up a very flimsy contact with the outside world, with children who, like us, went to the state schools. Two teachers we had in common, both from the
Guarini
school, acted as go-betweens.

There was Meldolesi, who taught us Italian, Latin, Greek, history and geography in the fourth form at school, and every second afternoon, from the district of small houses that had grown up outside Porta San Benedetto in those years, where he lived alone in a furnished room the view and aspect of which he used to tell us about, rode out on his bicycle to Barchetto del Duca, and sometimes spent three hours on end there. And signora Fabiani, who taught mathematics, did the same.

Nothing very much, to be honest, ever leaked out through signora Fabiani. She was from Bologna, a widow over fifty without children, and terribly pious; while we were being questioned we would see her withdrawing, whispering to herself and rolling her Flemish blue eyes continuously, as ifshe wasjust about to be carried away in an ecstasy. She was praying. For poor souls like us, no doubt, most of us quite hopeless at algebra; but also very likely to hasten the conversion of the wealthy Jews to whose house-and what a house it was !-she went twice a week. The conversion of professor Ermanno and signora Olga and of the two children above all, Alberto so intelligent and Micol so lively and so pretty, must have seemed to her too important and too urgent a task for her to risk the chance of success by gossiping at school.

Meldolesi, on the other hand, was far from silent about them. He came from a peasant family at Cornac-chio, and was educated entirely at a seminary (and there was a great deal of the priest about him, the little sharp, almost feminine country priest), and afterwards at Bologna University, where he read and was in time for the last lectures of Giosue Carducci, whose ‘‘humble pupil” he boasted of being: the afternoons spent at Barchetto del Duca, in an atmosphere steeped in Renaissance memories, and five o’clock tea taken with the whole family-signora Olga very often came back from the park just then, her arms full of flowers-and later on in the library, perhaps, enjoying professor Ermanno’s learned conversation until it was dark: those extraordinary afternoons were clearly something precious to him, and they provided him with material for everlasting chat and digressions with us as well.

Since professor Ermanno had revealed to him one evening that in 1875 Carducci had been his parents’ guest for ten days on end, and had then shown him the room he had occupied, had let him touch the bed he had slept in, and had finally given him to take home and look through at leisure a sheaf of signed letters written by the poet to his mother, Meldolesi’s excitement and enthusiasm knew no bounds. He actually got to the point of persuading himself, and trying to persuade us as well, that the famous line in the
Canzone di Legnano:

O bionda, o bella imperatrice, o fida*

in which the even more famous lines:

Ottde venisti? Quali a noi secolit si mite e bella ti tramandarano . . .

* O fair, beautiful and trusted empress.

Whence came you ?What centuries passed you on to us, so mild and lovely. t A critic (1884-1915).

are clearly foreshadowed, and the poet’s famous conversion to the “charm of royal womanhood” of the house of Savoy, were all inspired by the grandmother of his pupils Alberto and Micol Finzi-Contini. Oh, what a splendid subject it would be-he sighed in class once-for an article to send to the
Nuova Antologia,
in which Alfredo Grilli, his friend and colleague Grilli, had for some time been publishing his sharp-witted pieces on Renato Serra !:j: Some day, with all the necessary tact, of course, he would try mentioning it to the owner of the letters. And God willing, if only-considering the number of years that had passed, and the importance and, obviously, the perfect correctness of letters in which Carducci addressed the lady only as “dear baroness” and “kind hostess”, and such-like-if only he didn’t refuse! In the happy event of professor Ermanno agreeing he, Giulio Meldolesi, would at once -supposing he were given explicit permission to do so by the one person who had the right to give or withhold it-copy the letters one by one, and add to those sacred fragments, those venerable sparks from the great hammer, a minimum amount of comment. What, in

deed, did the text of the letters require? Nothing but a general introduction, possibly with a few historico-philological footnotes . . . .

But apart from the teachers we had in common, there were also the exams for those who were taught privately-exams that took place in June, at the same time as the ones for the pupils at the state schools-and these brought us into direct contact with Alberto and Micol at least once a year.

These were, perhaps, the very happiest days for us at school, especially if we had been moved up a form. As if suddenly regretting the' lessons and homework just done with, we found no better place to meet as a rule than the big entrance hall, where we hung about in the cool, crypt-like gloom, standing before the big white sheets of paper with the results on them, fascinated by our names and those of our friends, which, when we read them like that, set down in beautiful handwriting under glass, behind a light wire grating, never ceased to amaze us. It was fine to have no more to fear from school, fine to be able to go out soon afterwards into the limpid blue light of ten o’clock in the morning, that winked at us through the private way in, fine to have long hours of idleness and freedom before us to spend however we liked. Everything was fine, everything was marvellous, in those first days of the holidays. And then there was the joy of thinking, as we kept doing, of our coming departure for the sea or the mountains where work, which wearied and worried so many others still, would hardly be a memory!