“Well then, seeing it’s a matter of the heat, why don’t you go to the mountains for a fortnight?” “Mountains in August? I ask you! Besides . . .”-and he smiled
-“Juden sind
everywhere
unerwiinscht.
Have you forgotten?”
“Nonsense. Not at San Martino di Castrozza, for instance. You could perfectly well go to San Martino-or even to the Lido in Venice, to the Alberoni beach. . . . The
Corriere della Sera
said so last week.”
“How ghastly. August in an hotel, elbow to elbow with gangs of jolly Levis and Cohenim-no thanks, that’s not my idea of fun. I’d sooner stick it out here till September.”
The following evening, taking advantage of the new friendliness the reading of my poems had aroused between us, I resolved to speak to Malnate about Alberto’s health. There was no doubt about it-I said-something was wrong with him. Hadn’t he noticed Alberto’s difficulty in breathing? And didn’t it seem to him at least odd that no one in the family, neither his uncle nor his father, had done a single thing to get him better? His uncle, the doctor from Venice, didn’t believe in medicine, so that was that. But what about the others, including Micol? Calm, smiling, seraphic: nobody moved a finger.
Malnate listened to me in silence.
“I shouldn’t worry too much,” he said at last, sounding faintly embarrassed. “D’you really think he’s in such a bad way?”
“Good God!” I burst out. “Why, he must have lost twenty pounds in the last couple of months!”
“Oh, come on! Twenty pounds is a hell of a lot, you know.”
“Well, maybe not twenty, but fourteen, sixteen. At least.”
He was silent, thinking it over. Then he admitted that he too had noticed Alberto wasn’t well a while ago. On the other hand-he went on-were we really sure we weren’t getting worked up about nothing? If his nearest relations weren’t doing a thing, if even professor Ermanno’s face showed not the slightest sign of anxiety, well. . . . Now take professor Ermanno: suppose Alberto were really ill, could he possibly have bothered to lug along a couple of lorry-loads of red earth from Imola for the tennis court? And, by the way, about the tennis court: did I know they were going to start enlarging that famous surround within the next few days?
Thus, starting with Alberto and his presumed illness, we imperceptibly brought the Finzi-Continis-a subject taboo until then-into our evening conversations. We both knew quite clearly that we were walking on a minefield, and for this very reason went ahead very cautiously, careful not to stumble. All the same, whenever we spoke of them as a family, as an “institution” (I don’t know which of us first used this word: I remember we liked it, and it made us laugh), Malnate didn’t spare them, and was harshly critical. What impossible people! -he said. What an odd, ridiculous bundle of incurable contradictions they represented, “sociaily”! Sometimes when he thought of the vast amount of land they owned, of the thousands of labourers who worked it, disciplined, submissive slaves of the Corporative Regime, sometimes he was even inclined to prefer the grim “regular” country landlords who in 1920, ’21 and ’22 hadn’t hesitated to open up their purses to set up and fatten those black-shirted squads who went round beating people up and giving them the castor-oil treatment.
At least
they were fascists. When the time came, there’d be no doubt about how to treat them. But what about the Finzi-Continis?
And he shook his head with the air of a man who could understand if he wished, but didn’t want to, just didn’t feel he could: subtleties, complications, infinitesimal distinctions, might be all very interesting and amusing, but only up to a point, there had got to be some sort oflimit.
Late one night, after the middle of August, we stopped for a drink at a wine shop in via Gorgadello, beside the cathedral, just a few steps from where, till a year and a half ago, Dr. Fadigati, the well-known ear, nose and throat specialist, had had his surgery. Between one glass and the next I told Malnate about the doctor, whose good friend, the only one he had left in Ferrara, I had become in the last five months before his suicide “for love” (I said “for love”: and at that point Malnate couldn’t restrain a sarcastic, strictly undergraduate giggle). It was only a step from Fadigati to homosexuality in general; on which Malnate had very simple views: proper goi notions, I thought to myself. To him, pederasts were just “wretches”, poor “obsessed” creatures who should be treated only from the medical point of view, or in order to take social precautions. Whereas I maintained that love justified and sanctified everything, even pederasty; indeed that love, when it is pure, that is totally disinterested, is always abnormal, asocial, etc.: just like art-I went on-which, when it is pure and therefore useless, no priest of any religion, including the priests ofsocialism, ever approves of. Forgetting our good intentions for once, we worked ourselves up into an argument that was almost like those in the old days, until it suddenly dawned on us that we'd drunk a bit too much, and we burst out laughing together. After which we left the wine shop, crossed the half-empty Listone, and went up San Romano, till at last we found ourselves walking haphazardly along via delle Volte.
A cobbled street, full of holes and without a pavement, it seemed even darker than usual. As ever, while we practically groped our way along, guided only by the light from the half-open doors of the brothels, Malnate started reciting a few lines ofPorta: not from
Ninetta,
I remember, but from the
Marchionn di gamb avert.*
* “Melchior with the bandy legs.”
He declaimed in a low voice, in the sad bitter tone he always assumed when he recited the
Lament:
Finalment l alba tance veult spionada Pi comparsa anca lee dai filidur
. . .f
t “At last the da-wn, so long looked for, appeared through the cracks [in the shutters].”
but here he suddenly broke in on himself.
“What would you say,” he asked me, jerking his chin in the direction of a brothel door, “to our going in for a look?”
There was nothing very remarkable about the suggestion; all the same, coming from him, with whom I’d always spoken so seriously, it surprised and embarrassed me.
“That’s hardly one of the best,” I replied. “It must be one of the under ten lire ones. . . . Never mind, though, let’s go in.”
It was late, almost one in the morning, and we were hardly welcome. The portress, on a rush-seated chair behind the door, started grumbling because she didn’t want us bringing in our bikes; then the owner, a pale, dried-up little stick of a woman of indefinable age, wearing glasses and dressed in black like a kind of nun, started grousing about the bikes and the time as well. Then a maid, who had already started cleaning up the little parlours, all brooms and dusters and long-handled dustpan under her arm, shot us a scornful glare as we crossed the entrance hall. And even the girls, gathered peaceably together and chatting away in a single sitting room round a group of regulars, didn’t look too friendly. None of them joined us. No less than ten minutes went by, during which Malnate and I sat facing each other in the small separate room into which the proprietress steered us, hardly exchanging a word (the girls’ laughter, the coughs and drowsy voices of their customer-friends, reached us through the wall) before a little blonde with a delicate air and hair drawn back on to the nape of her neck, soberly dressed like a schoolgirl of good family, decided to appear at the door.
She didn’t seem all that fed up, either.
“Good evening,” she said.
She examined us calmly, her blue eyes brimful of irony. Then she turned to me and said:
“Well,
celestino*,
what about it?” * The prostitute, like Micol, calls the narrator celestino because of his blue eyes.
“What’s your name?” I managed to stammer.
‘‘Gisella.’’
“Where are you from?”
“Bologna!” she exclaimed, opening her eyes wide, as if promising heaven knows what.
But it wasn’t true. Calmly, perfectly self-possessed, Malnate noticed it at once.
“Bologna my eye,” he said. “You’re from Lombardy, I’ve got a feeling, but not from Milan. Get along with you, you’re from around Como.’’
“How on earth did you guess?” the girl asked, astounded.
The owner’s sharp face popped up behind her, meantime.
“Well,” she grumbled, “there seems a lot of useless talk going on around here.”
“Oh no,” protested Gisella, smiling and pointing to me. “Celestino here’s got serious intentions. Shall we
go?"
Before I got up and followed her I turned to Malnate. But he was looking at me encouragingly, affectionately.
“What about you?”
He gave a short laugh, and gestured vaguely as if to say: “I don’t come into this; I’m quite outside it.”
“Don’ t worry about me,” he said. “Get along upstairs, I’ll wait for you.”
Everything took place very quickly. When we went downstairs again Malnate was chatting with the owner. He had taken out his pipe, and was talking and smoking, finding out about the prostitutes’ “economic treatment”, about the way their fortnightly rota-system worked, about the “medical check-ups”, etc. ; and her answers were just as responsible and serious as his questions.
“Bon,” * Malnate said at last, when he noticed me, and got up.
He went ahead of me across the hall, towards the bicycles we had leant against the wall beside the door, while the owner, who had now grown very polite, ran ahead of us to open the door.
“Good night,” said Malnate. He dropped a coin into the portress’s outstretched palm, and went out first.
“So long, love,” shouted Gisella, yawning, before disappearing into the sitting-room where her workmates were gathered. “Mind you come back!”
“So long,” I replied, going out myself.
“Good night, gentlemen,” the owner whispered respectfully behind me; and I could hear her bolting the door.
Holding our handlebars, we went up via Scianze to the corner ofvia Mazzini, and there turned to the right for via Saraceno. It was Malnate who was talking mostly, now. He told me what he had found out from the owner of the brothel. In Milan, until a few years before-he said-he’d been a pretty keen customer ofthe famous brothel of San Pietro all’Orto (where-he added -he had several times tried to take Alberto, but quite without success), but it was only now that he’d bothered to find out something about the laws that regulated the “system”. Christ, what a life these prostitutes led! And how abject and reactionary the “Ethical State” was, to trade in human flesh like this!
Then, noticing I was scarcely answering, and unwillingly at that, he asked:
“What’s up? Don’t you feel well?”
“I’m all right.”
“Omne
animal post coitum
triste,” he sighed. “But don’t brood about it. Get a good night’s sleep, and everything’ll be fine tomorrow, you’ll see.”
“I know, I know.”
We turned left, along via Borgo di Sotto.
“The schoolmistress Clelia Trotti must live somewhere round here,” he said, gesturing towards the small houses on the right, in the direction ofvia Fondo Banchetto.
I didn’t answer. He coughed.
“Well . . . how are things going with Miool ?”
I was suddenly seized by a great need to confide in him, to open up.
“Badly, that’s how. I’ve fallen pretty hard, you know.”
“Oh, we’ve realized that,” he said, laughing good-naturedly. “For some time now. But how’s it going at the moment? Is she still ill-treating you?”
“No. As you’ll have noticed, we’ve reached a certain
modus vivendi
just lately.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed that you’re not always scratching away at each other, the way you used to. I’m glad you’re friends again. It was nonsense.”
My mouth twisted, my eyes swam with tears. Mal-nate must have noticed the state I was in.
“Oh, come along now,” he urged me, embarrassed. “You
mustn’t
let yourself go like this.”
I swallowed, with an effort.
“I don’t think we’ll ever be friends again,” I murmured. “It’s no good.”
“That’s nonsense,” he said. “If only you knew how fond of you she is. When you’re not there and she talks about you-and she very often does, you know-no-one’s allowed to say a word against you. If anyone does, she’s on him like a viper. Alberto’s very fond of you, too, and thinks very well of you. In fact-maybe it was a bit indiscreet of me-but a few days ago I recited your poem to them. And you just can’t imagine how much they liked it: both of them, d’you hear, both of them. ...”
“I don’t know what to do with their fondness and their good opinion,” I said.
We had come out, meantime, into the little piazza in front of the church of Santa Maria in Vado. There was not a living soul to be seen, either here or along via Scandiana as far as the Montagnone. In silence we went across to the fountain beside the churchyard. Malnate leant down to drink, and after him I drank as well and washed my face.
“Listen,” Malnate continued, as he started walking again, “I think that’s just where you’re wrong. Liking and good opinion, especially in times like these, are the only values you can really rdy on. What’s more disinterested than friendship? Besides, I don’t feel, well, at least from what I know it doesn’t seem to me that anything happened between you that . . . After all, in time it may perfectly well . . . Now look, for instance: why don’t you come and play tennis more often, the way you did a few months ago? Absence doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder, you know! Actually, old thing,, I’ve a feeling you don’t know much about women.
“But it was she herselfwho told me not to come so often!” I burst out. “What d’you suggest, that I take no notice? It’s her house, after all !”
For a few seconds he was silent and thoughtful.
“I can hardly believe it,” he said at last. “I might even understand if there’d been something between you . . . how can I put it ... something serious, irreparable. But what actually happened?”
He stared at me, uncertainly.
“Forgive this rather . . . undiplomatic question,” he went on, and smiled. “But did you ever get to the point ofkissing her, at least?”