The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read online

  ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disìo …’1 an ironic quiet voice recited, very close by.

  I turned round astonished. It was Professor Ermanno himself, seemingly happy to have startled me, and smiling good-naturedly. He gently took me by the arm, and thence, very slowly, keeping some way away from the wire-netting surround and every now and then coming to a halt, we began to walk round the tennis court. Having almost effected a complete tour, we retraced our steps. Back and forth, the darkness gradually deepening round us, we went through this same manoeuvre a number of times. Meanwhile we talked, or rather, for the most part, he, the Professor, talked.

  He began by asking my opinion of the tennis court, if I really found it execrable. Micòl had no doubts on this subject: if he were to follow her advice, they’d have to give it a complete overhaul, utterly modernize it. For his part, he remained unsure. Maybe, as usual, his ‘dear little whirlwind’ was making too much of it. Maybe it wasn’t absolutely necessary to turn everything upside down, as she seemed to want.

  ‘In any case,’ he added, ‘in a few days it’ll start to rain, no use pretending otherwise. Don’t you think it might be better to put off whatever needs to be done until next year?’

  This said, he went on to ask me what I was doing, and what my plans were for the immediate future. And how my parents were.

  Whilst he was asking me about my ‘Papa’, I noticed two things. First of all that he was having difficulty in addressing me with ‘tu’, in fact a little while after, coming to an abrupt halt, he explicitly asked me if this was all right, and straight away, with some warmth and sincerity, I begged him not to use the ‘lei’ form with me, or I’d be upset. Secondly, that the interest and respect which showed in his voice and face whilst he was asking how my father was (especially in his eyes – the lenses of his glasses, magnifying them, emphasized the gravity and meekness of their expression) didn’t seem at all forced, or the least bit hypocritical. He reminded me to pass on his best wishes. And his ‘congratulations’ as well – for the many trees that had been planted in our cemetery since my father had taken over responsibility for it. Regarding this, would some pine trees be of any use? Some cedars of Lebanon? Some fir trees? Or weeping willows? I should put it to my father. If by any chance they would be useful (these days, with the methods of modern agriculture, transplanting broad-trunked trees had become a simple matter), he would be only too pleased to provide whatever number were required. It was a wonderful idea, I had to admit! Thickly planted with lovely tall trees, even our cemetery would be able, in the course of time, to rival that of San Niccolò del Lido in Venice.

  ‘Don’t you know it?’

  I replied that I didn’t.

  ‘Oh, but you must, you really must try to go there as soon as you can!’ he insisted with much animation. ‘It’s a national monument! Besides, as a literary man, you’ll most certainly remember the start of Giovanni Prati’s Edmenegarda.’2

  I was forced once again to confess my ignorance.

  ‘Well,’ the Professor continued, ‘it’s precisely there that Prati begins his Edmenegarda, in the Lido’s Jewish cemetery, which in the nineteenth century was considered one of the most romantic sites in Italy. But make sure, if and when you do go, that you don’t forget to tell the cemetery caretaker straight away (he’s the one with the entrance keys) that you want to visit the old one, this is important, the old cemetery, where no one’s been buried since the eighteenth century, and not the other, the modern one, next to it but quite separate. I discovered it in 1905, just imagine. Even though I was almost twice your present age, I was still unmarried. I was living at Venice (I’d been living there for two years), and I would go and visit the place, even in winter sometimes, whenever I wasn’t at the State Archives burrowing through manuscripts concerning the various so-called ‘Nations’ into which the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venetian Jewish Community were divided – the Levantine Nation, the Northern, the German and the Italian. It’s true I hardly ever went there on my own,’ here he smiled, ‘and that, in a certain sense, deciphering the gravestones one by one, many of which date back to the early sixteenth century, and are written in Spanish or Portuguese, I was continuing with my archival researches in the open air. Oh, they were delightful afternoons I spent there … what peace and serenity … with the small entrance, facing the Laguna, which opened only for us. We became engaged right there within the cemetery, Olga and myself.’

  He remained silent for a short while. I took the opportunity to ask him what exactly was the subject of his archival research.

  ‘At the outset I began with an idea of writing a history of the Venetian Jewry,’ he replied, ‘a subject which Olga herself had suggested to me, and which Roth, the English Jew Cecil Roth,3 had treated so brilliantly some ten years later. But then, as often happens with historians who become too … passionately involved, some particular seventeenth-century documents which I came across began to engross all my attention, and ended up taking me off course. I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you all about it if you come back … It has the makings of a real novel, however you look at it … but, anyway, instead of the fat historical tome which I aspired to write, at the end of two years’ work I hadn’t managed to put together (apart from marrying, that is) anything but two pamphlets: one, that I still believe may be of use, in which I’ve gathered together all the cemetery’s inscriptions, and the other in which I’ve made public the existence of those seventeenth-century papers I was telling you about, but only that, narrating the facts, without venturing on any interpretation with respect to them. Would you be interested in looking at them? Yes? One of these days you must let me present you with copies. But besides all this, please do go, I really recommend it, to the Jewish cemetery at the Lido (the old section, I repeat!). It’s worth the trouble, you’ll see. You’ll find it just as it was thirty-five years ago, exactly the same.’

  We turned back slowly towards the tennis court. At first sight, it seemed as though no one was left there. And yet, in the almost total darkness, Micòl and Carletto Sani were still playing. Micòl was complaining: apparently ‘Cochet’ was hitting the ball too hard, hardly the behaviour of a ‘gentleman’, and in that darkness it was ‘frankly too much’.

  ‘I heard from Micòl that you weren’t sure whether to graduate in Art History or in Italian,’ Professor Ermanno was saying to me in the meantime. ‘So have you decided yet?’

  I told him that I had, that I’d made up my mind to do my thesis in Italian. My uncertainty – I explained – had been due to the fact that up until a few days ago I’d still been hoping to be supervised by Professor Longhi, who had the chair in Art History, but that, at the last moment, he had put in for a two-year study leave away from teaching duties. The thesis I would have wanted to write under his supervision would have looked at a group of Ferrara painters in the second half of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries: Scarsellino, Bastianino, Bastarolo, Bonone, Caletti, Calzolaretto and some others. Only with Longhi’s guidance, writing on material like this, would I have had a chance to produce something of quality. And so, since he, Longhi, had obtained two years of leave from the Ministry, it had seemed to me a better idea to fall back on some other thesis, but in the Italian department.

  He had stood there listening to me, deep in thought.

  ‘Longhi?’ he asked finally, twisting his lips in doubt. ‘What does this mean? Have they already appointed the new chair in Art History?

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘But surely,’ he insisted, ‘the Professor of Art History at Bologna, I’ve always heard that it was Igino Benvenuto Supino, one of the most illustrious figures of Italian Jewry. So then …’

  He had been – I interrupted – had been, until 1933. But after 1934, in place of Supino, put out to grass having passed his retirement age, they had called in Roberto Longhi. Didn’t he know, I proceeded – happy this time to find him lacking in information – the crucial essays of Roberto Longhi on Piero della Francesca and on
Caravaggio and his school? Didn’t he know the Officina ferrarese, a work that had created such an uproar in 1933, at the time of the Ferrara Renaissance Exhibition held the same year in the Palazzo dei Diamanti? My thesis would have been based upon the last pages of the Officina, where the theme had been touched, albeit magisterially, but without full development.

  I talked on, and Professor Ermanno, more hunched than ever, stood and listened to me in silence. What was he thinking about? About the number of ‘illustrious’ university figures which Italian Jewry had supplied from the Unification to the present time? Probably.

  Suddenly I saw him grow animated.

  Looking around, and lowering his voice to a stifled whisper, as if he were letting me into something no less than a state secret, he divulged the big news: that he possessed a batch of Carducci’s unpublished letters, written by the poet to Professor Ermanno’s mother in 1875. If I would be interested in seeing them, and if I considered them a fitting subject for a graduation thesis in Italian, he would be only to pleased to let me have them.

  Thinking of Meldolesi, I couldn’t help smiling. What had become of that essay he’d meant to send to the Nuova antologia? So after talking so much about it, had he actually managed to do nothing? Poor Meldolesi. Some years back he’d been transferred to the Minghetti in Bologna – to his great satisfaction, as can be imagined! One day I really would have to track him down …

  Despite the darkness, Professor Ermanno realized I was smiling.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ he said ‘for some time you youngsters have had a low opinion of Giosuè Carducci! I know that you prefer figures such as Pascoli or D’Annunzio to him.’

  It was easy for me to convince him that I’d been smiling for quite a different reason, that being disappointment. If I’d only known that some of Carducci’s unpublished letters were to be found in Ferrara! Instead of proposing to Professor Calcaterra, as unfortunately I had already done, a thesis on Panzacchi, I could easily have suggested a ‘Carducci in Ferrara’ theme which would undoubtedly have been of more interest. But who knows: perhaps if I was to speak frankly to Professor Calcaterra, who was a very decent person, he might still let me switch from Panzacchi to Carducci without making too much of a fuss about it.

  ‘When are you hoping to graduate?’ Professor Ermanno finally asked me.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’d like it to be next year in June. Don’t forget that I, too, am fuori corso.’

  He nodded several times in silence.

  ‘Fuori corso?’ he then sighed. ‘Well, that’s not so bad.’

  He made a vague gesture with his hand, as if to say that, with all that was happening, both I and his children would have plenty of time on our hands, if not too much.

  My father had been right. He didn’t finally seem all that distressed by this fact. Quite the reverse.

  5

  It was Micòl who wanted to show me the garden. She was very keen on the idea. ‘I’d say I had a certain right to do so,’ she’d sniggered, looking at me.

  It was not on that first day. I’d played tennis until late, and it was Alberto, when he had finished competing with his sister, who accompanied me as far as a kind of Alpine hut in miniature, half hidden in a thicket of fir trees and about a hundred metres away from the court – the Hütte as he and Micòl called it – and in this hut or Hütte, used as a changing-room, I’d been able to change, and later, as darkness fell, to take a hot shower and get dressed again.

  But the next day, things fell out differently. A doubles match with Adriana Trentini and Bruno Lattes playing against the two fifteen-year-olds (with Malnate perched atop the umpire’s chair playing the role of patient scorer) had quickly assumed the guise of one of those games that never end.

  ‘What should we do?’ Micòl had asked me at a certain point, rising to her feet. ‘I’ve the impression that it’ll be a good hour before you, me, Alberto and our friend the Milanese will get a chance to swap places on court. Listen: what if during the wait us two were to slope off for a brief tour of the plants?’ As soon as the court’s free – she had added – Alberto will be sure to call us. He’d stick three fingers in his mouth, and honour us all with his famous whistle!

  Smiling, she had already turned towards Alberto, who was stretched out nearby on a third deckchair with his face hidden beneath a straw hat and dozing off in the sun.

  ‘Isn’t that so, Sir Pasha?’

  From under his hat Sir Pasha had agreed with a nod of his head, and we went off together. Yes, her brother was remarkable – Micòl meanwhile continued explaining. When circumstances required, the whistles he could come up with were so ear-shattering that beside them those of shepherds were merely laughable. It was odd though, wasn’t it, that someone like him could do that? Just looking, you wouldn’t think much of him. And yet … who knows where he fetched up all that breath from!

  And so it was, nearly always whiling away the wait between one match and the next, that we began our long forays together. The first times we took our bikes with us. The garden being ‘some’ ten hectares in size, and the driveways, large and small, extending over a dozen or so kilometres, a bicycle was, to say the least, indispensable, my fellow traveller had promptly declared. True, today – she admitted – we’ll limit ourselves to a ‘survey’ down there, towards the sunset, where she and Alberto, as children, often used to go to watch the trains being shunted in the station. But if we went on foot, how, even today, would we manage to get back? We’d risk being caught out by Alberto’s ‘oliphant’, without the chance of getting ourselves back with the required dispatch.

  So that first day we went to watch the trains manoeuvring in the station. And then? Then we turned back, round by the tennis court, across the forecourt of the magna domus (deserted as always and sadder than ever) and, doubling back, we went beyond the dark wooden bridge over the Panfilio canal, took the entrance driveway back till we reached the tunnel of rattan palms and the gate on Corso Ercole I. Having arrived here, Micòl insisted that we thread our way down the winding path that followed right round the surrounding wall: first to the left, alongside the Mura degli Angeli, so far that in a quarter of an hour we had again reached that zone of the park from which the station was visible, and from there we explored the opposite side, far more wild and rather dark and melancholy, which flanked the deserted Via Arianuova. We were there, making our way with some difficulty through the ferns, nettles and thorny bushes, when suddenly in the distance behind the thick mesh of tree trunks Alberto’s sheep-herding whistle was heard calling us back with all haste to our ‘hard labours’.

  With a few variations in the route, we repeated these far-flung expeditions a number of times in the afternoons that followed. When space permitted it, we pedalled alongside each other. And meanwhile we talked – mostly about trees, at least to begin with.

  This was a subject I knew nothing, or almost nothing, about – which caused Micòl no end of astonishment. She looked at me as though I was some kind of monster.

  ‘Is it possible you can be so uninformed?’ she exclaimed. ‘Surely you must have studied a little botany at school!’

  ‘Let’s see now,’ she pursued the point, her eyebrows ready to rise at some further, shocking lapse. ‘May I enquire, please, what kind of tree milord thinks that one down there is?’

  She might just as well have been singling out an honest elm or a native lime tree as some exceptionally rare African, Asiatic or American plant which only a specialist would be able to identify, since they had everything there, at the Barchetto del Duca, absolutely everything. As for me, I always replied at random: partly because I seriously couldn’t distinguish an elm from a lime tree, and partly because I realized that nothing gave her more pleasure than seeing me make a mistake.

  It seemed absurd to her that such a person as myself existed in the world without sharing her own feelings of passionate admiration for trees, ‘those huge, quiet, strong, profound beings’. How could I not understand, good Lord, how come I didn’t feel i
t? At the end of the tennis clearing, for example, to the west of the court, there was a group of seven slender, extremely tall Washingtoniae graciles, or desert palms, separated from the rest of the greenery behind (the usual thick-trunked trees of the European forest: oaks, ilexes, plane trees, horse chestnuts, etc.), surrounded by a good stretch of lawn. Every time we passed nearby, Micòl always had some new words of tenderness for the isolated group of Washingtoniae.

  ‘There they are, my seven dear old men,’ she might say. ‘Look what venerable beards they have!’

  But seriously – she would insist – didn’t they seem even to me like the seven hermits of the Thebaid,1 dried up by the sun and by fasting? What elegance, what saintliness they had in their brown, dry, curved, scaly trunks! Truly they seemed like so many John the Baptists, dieting on nothing but locusts.

  But her sympathies, as I’ve already said, were not limited to exotic trees.2

  For one enormous plane tree, with a whitish, warty trunk thicker than any other in the garden, and I believe than any in the entire province, her admiration overflowed into reverence. Naturally it hadn’t been her ‘grandma Josette’ who’d planted it, but Ercole I d’Este in person, or maybe even Lucrezia Borgia.

  ‘It’s almost five hundred years old, can you imagine that?’ she sighed, narrowing her eyes. ‘Just think for a moment all it must have witnessed since it first saw the light!’

  Then it seemed as though the gigantic plane tree also had eyes and ears: eyes to see us with, and ears to hear us.