The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read online

  What resulted was an extraordinary mishmash into which flowed the architectonic echoes of Theodoric’s mausoleum at Ravenna, of the Egyptian temples at Luxor, of Roman baroque, and even, as the thickset columns of the peristyle proclaimed, of the ancient Greek constructions of Cnossos. But there it stood. Little by little, year after year, time, which in its way always adjusts everything, had managed to make even that unlikely hotchpotch of clashing styles somehow in keeping. Moisè Finzi-Contini, here declared ‘the very model of the austere and tireless worker’, passed away in 1863. His wife, Allegrina Camaioli, ‘angel of the hearth’, in 1875. Then in 1877, still youthful, their only son, Doctor of Engineering Menotti, followed more than twenty years later in 1898, by his consort Josette, from the Treviso branch of the baronial family of the Artoms. Thereafter the upkeep of the chapel, which gathered to itself in 1914 only one other family member, Guido, a six-year-old boy, had clearly fallen to those less and less inclined to tidy, maintain and repair any damage whenever that was required, and above all to fight off the persistent inroads made by the surrounding weeds that were besieging it. Tufts of swarthy, almost black grass of a near-metallic consistency, and ferns, nettles, thistles, poppies were allowed to advance and invade with ever greater licence. So much so that in 1924, in 1925, some sixty years from its founding, when as a baby I happened to see the Finzi-Continis’ tomb for the first time – ‘a total monstrosity’, as my mother, holding my hand, never failed to call it – it already looked more or less as it does today, when for many years there has been no one left directly responsible for its upkeep. Half drowned in wild green, with its many-hued marble surfaces, originally polished and shining, dulled with drifts of grey dust, the roof and outer steps cracked by baking sunlight and frosts, even then it seemed changed, as every long-submerged object is, into something rich and strange.

  Who knows from what, and why, a vocation for solitude is born. The fact remains that the same isolation, the very separateness with which the Finzi-Continis surrounded their deceased, also surrounded the other house they owned, the one at the end of Corso Ercole I d’Este. Immortalized by Giosuè Carducci and Gabriele D’Annunzio, this Ferrara street is so well known to lovers of art and poetry the world over that any description of it would only be superfluous. As is well known, it is in the very heart of that northern zone of the city which the Renaissance added to the cramped medieval quarters, and which for that reason is called the Addizione Erculea.2 Broad, straight as a sword from the Castello to the Mura degli Angeli, flanked its whole length by the sepia bulk of upper-class residences, with its distant, sublime backdrop of red bricks, green vegetation and sky, which really seems to lead you on towards the infinite: Corso Ercole I d’Este is so handsome, such is its touristic renown, that the joint Socialist-Communist administration, responsible to the Ferrara Council for more than fifteen years, has recognized the obligation to leave it be, to defend it against any and every possible disruption by speculative building or commercial interests, in short to conserve the whole original aristocratic character of the place.

  It is a famous street: and what is more, it remains effectively undisturbed.

  All the same, with particular reference to the Finzi-Contini house, although one can reach it even today from Corso Ercole I – unless you want to add on more than half a kilometre across a huge clearing, barely or not at all cultivated; and although this still incorporates the historic ruins of a sixteenth-century building, once a residence or extensive ‘pleasure dome’, which were acquired, as usual, by the same Moisè in 1850, and later transformed by his heirs, through a series of adaptations and restorations, into an English manor-house in a neo-Gothic style: despite so many interesting features which still survive, who knows anything about it, I wonder, and who even remembers it? The Touring Club Guide does not mention it, and this lets any passing tourists off the hook. But even in Ferrara itself, the few Jews left that make up the dwindling Jewish community have the air of having forgotten it.

  Although the early twentieth-century Touring Club Guides never failed to recognize it, in a curious tone poised between the lyrical and the worldly, the current edition does not mention it, and this is certainly unfortunate. Still, to be fair: the garden or, to be more precise, the vast parkland, which before the war encircled the Finzi-Contini house and stretched for almost ten hectares up to the Mura degli Angeli on one side and the Barriera di Porta San Benedetto on the other, and representing in itself something rare and exceptional, no longer exists, literally speaking. All the broad-canopied trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even the palm trees and eucalyptuses, planted in their hundreds by Josette Artom during the last two years of the First World War, were cut down for firewood, and for some time the land had returned to the state it was in when Moisè Finzi-Contini acquired it from the Marchesi of Avogli: one of the many great gardens ringed within the city walls.

  Which leaves the house itself. Except that the huge, singular edifice, badly damaged by a bombardment in 1944, is still today occupied by fifty or so families of evacuees, belonging to the city’s wretched sub-proletariat, not unlike the plebs of the Roman slums, who continue to cluster especially in the entrance of the Palazzone of Via Mortara: an embittered, wild, aggrieved tribe (some months back, I heard, they received with a hail of stones the Council’s Inspector of Hygiene, who had come on his bicycle to survey the place). And so as to discourage any future eviction on the part of the Overseers of the Local Monuments of Emilia and Romagna, it seems they had the bright idea of scraping the last remnants of antique murals from the walls.

  So why, now, send unsuspecting tourists into such a trap? – I figure the compilers of the last Touring Club Guide must have asked themselves. And in the end what exactly would there be left to see?

  2

  If the tomb of the Finzi-Contini family could be mocked as ‘a monstrosity’, then their house, islanded down there among the mosquitoes and frogs of the Panfilio canal and the drainage ditches, and enviously nicknamed the magna domus, no, that – not even after fifty years – quite qualified for mockery. Oh, little enough was required to get all het up about it. All you needed to do, I suppose, was to find yourself walking along the interminable outer wall which separated the garden from Corso Ercole I d’Este, a wall interrupted, almost halfway, by a solemn, darkened oak gate, lacking, as it happens, any door handles; or else, from the other side, from atop the Mura degli Angeli girding the park, to gaze deep into the wild intricacy of trunks, branches and foliage, as far as a glimpse of the strange sharpened profile of the manor-house, with, far behind it, the edge of a clearing, the grey stain of the tennis court – and then the ancient injury of their aloofness and seclusion would once again return to torment, to burn inside almost exactly as it had before.

  What a typically nouveau-riche notion, what presumptuousness! – my father liked to repeat, with a kind of impassioned rancour, every time he felt called on to confront this question.

  Yes, yes, I know – he’d admit – the former owners of the place, the family of the Marchesi Avogli, had the ‘bluest’ blood running in their veins, the garden and the ruins flaunted ab antiquo the highly decorative title of Barchetto del Duca – all very well and good, I wouldn’t argue with that, and all the better that Moisè Finzi-Contini, who should take the undeniable credit of having ‘spotted’ the bargain, set himself back no more than the proverbial few coppers in clinching it. But so what? – he added immediately – just for this was it really necessary that Menotti, Moisè’s son, aptly named in dialect, from the colour of his eccentric fur-lined overcoat, al matt mugnaga, the apricot nutcase, was it really necessary for him to move himself and his wife Josette to such a far-off inconvenient part of the city, unhealthy even in those days not to mention now, and on top of everything else to such a deserted, melancholy, utterly inappropriate place?

  It was no great hardship for them, the parents, who belonged
to a different age, and who could, after all, easily bear the luxury of spending all the coppers they cared to on those old stones. Especially not for her, Josette Artom, of the Treviso branch of the Artom barons (in her day a magnificent woman, blond, big-breasted, blue-eyed, and in fact her mother was from Berlin, an Olschky). Besides being so crazy about the House of Savoy that in May 1898, a little before she died, she took the step of sending a congratulatory telegram to General Bava Beccaris, who fired on those poor devils, the socialists and anarchists in Milan, and besides being a fanatical admirer of Bismarck’s Germany, the land of the spiked helmet, from the time her husband Menotti, forever prostrate before her, installed her in his Valhalla she’d never bothered to hide her aversion to Jewish social life in Ferrara (for her it was always too claustrophobic, as she’d say) nor to hide, which is the truth however bizarre it may sound, her fundamental anti-Semitism.

  But as for Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga, all the same (he a studious man and she a Herrera of Venice, and thus born into a very good Western Sephardic family, without doubt most respectable but rather fallen in the world, and besides which highly orthodox), what kind of people did they mean to become? Real aristocrats? Certainly, one can understand that the loss of their son Guido, the first-born who died in 1914, only six years old, following a very sudden attack of infantile paralysis, American variety, against which even Corcos could do nothing, must have been a terrible blow for them – most of all for her, Signora Olga, who from then on never stopped wearing mourning. But setting that aside, wasn’t it the case that, due to living in such a cut-off way, they too had started acting like grandees and had fallen into the same deluded and inflated notions of Menotti Finzi-Contini and his worthy consort? Aristocracy – tell us another! Instead of giving themselves such airs, they’d have done much better, the both of them, not to forget who they were, and where they came from, if we’re to believe that the Jews – Sephardic and Ashkenazi, Western and Levantine, Tunisian, Berber, Yemenite and even Ethiopian – in whatever part of the world, under whatever skies history has scattered them, are and will always be Jews, which is to say close relatives. Old Moisè wasn’t one to give himself airs, not him! He didn’t have aristocratic mists befuddling his brain! When he was living in the ghetto, at no. 24, Via Vignatagliata, at the house where he’d have been quite content to end his days, withstanding the pressures brought to bear by his snooty Treviso-born mother-in-law, impatient to transfer the family with all haste to the Barchetto del Duca, it was he who went shopping every morning in Piazza delle Erbe with his shopping-basket under his arm; he who brought his family up from nothing and for this very reason was nicknamed al gatt, the cat. Because yes – if it was true that ‘La’ Josette had come down to Ferrara accompanied by a considerable dowry, which consisted of a villa in the Treviso province with frescos by Tiepolo, of a fat cheque and jewels, make that a heap of jewels, which on opening nights, against the red velvet backdrop of their private box, drew the gaze of the entire theatre to her swelling décolletage, then it was no less certain that it had been al gatt, and he alone, who had assembled in the Ferrara plain, between Codigoro, Massa Fiscaglia and Jolanda di Savoia, the thousands of hectares on which even today the main part of the family patrimony depends. The monumental tomb at the cemetery – that was the only mistake, the only failing (above all of taste) of which one could accuse Moisè Finzi-Contini. That and nothing else.

  This was how my father would go on – particularly at Passover, during the lengthy dinners that continued to be given at our house even after the death of grandpa Raffaello, attended by a score of friends and relatives, but also at Yom Kippur, when those same friends and relatives come back round to our house to end their fast.

  But I remember one Passover supper during which my father added something new and surprising to his usual grumblings – bitter, generic, always the same, made above all for the pleasure of recollecting the time-worn tales of the Jewish community.

  It was in 1933, the year of the so-called infornata del Decennale.1 Thanks to the ‘clemency’ of il Duce, who had suddenly had the inspired idea of opening his forgiving arms wide to every ‘agnostic or enemy of yesterday’, even in the circles of our Community the number of those enrolled within the Fascist Party had managed to rise at a stroke to ninety per cent. And my father, who sat down there, at his usual place at the head of the table, the same place from which for long decades grandpa Raffaello had been wont to hold forth with a completely different authority and severity, had not failed to congratulate himself on this turn of events. The rabbi Dr Levi had done very well to refer to it in the speech he recently gave at the Italian School synagogue when, in the presence of the major civic dignitaries – the Prefect, the Fascist Party’s Federal Secretary, the Podestà,2 the Brigadier-General of the local garrison – he had commemorated the Albertine Statute!3

  Yet he wasn’t entirely happy, Papa. In his boyish blue eyes, full of patriotic ardour, I could detect a shadow of disappointment. He must have perceived a small hitch, a little unforeseen and displeasing hindrance.

  And in fact, having begun at a certain point to count on his fingers how many of us, of us Ferrarese Judim, still remained ‘outside’, and having at last arrived at Ermanno Finzi-Contini – who had never taken up party membership, that’s true, but considering the very sizeable agricultural estates he’d inherited it was hard to figure out why he hadn’t – all of a sudden, as though fed up with himself and his own discretion, my father decided to disclose two curious bits of news: between them there was perhaps no direct relationship – he began by saying – but they were no less significant for that.

  First: that the lawyer Geremia Tabet, when, in his role as Sansepolcrista4 and intimate friend of the Federal Secretary, he presented himself at the Barchetto del Duca to offer the Professor a membership card with his name already on it, it was not only returned to him, but, shortly after, of course most politely but equally firmly, he was shown the door.

  ‘And with what excuse?’ someone asked faintly. ‘No one ever dreamt that Ermanno Finzi-Contini was such a lion.’

  ‘With what excuse did he refuse it?’ my father burst out laughing. ‘Oh, with one of the usual ones: that he was a scholar (I’d love to know of what!), that he was too old, that he’d never in his life been involved with politics, etc., etc. But the good fellow was canny about it. He must have noticed that Tabet had gone black in the face, and so, just like that, he slipped into his pocket five thousand in notes.’

  ‘Five thousand lire?’

  ‘Absolutely. To be spent on the Seaside and Mountain Summer Camps for the Opera Nazionale Ballila.5 He’d thought it through perfectly, no? But listen now to the second piece of news.’

  He then went on to inform the whole table exactly how, a few days earlier, with a letter he’d sent to the Community’s Council by way of the lawyer Renzo Galassi-Tarabini (in the whole world could he have found anyone more grovelling, arse-licking and haltofn1 than that?) the Professor had officially asked permission to restore at his own expense, ‘for the use of his family and anyone else who should be interested’, the small, old Spanish synagogue in Via Mazzini, which for at least three centuries had had no religious function and now served as a storeroom.

  3

  In 1914, when little Guido died, Professor Ermanno was forty-nine years old, and Signora Olga twenty-four. The child felt ill, was put to bed with a very high fever, and quickly fell into a profound torpor.

  Dr Corcos was called out urgently. After a silent, interminable examination conducted with furrowed brow, Corcos brusquely lifted his head and solemnly stared first at the father then at the mother. The looks that he gave them were long, severe and strangely disdainful. At the same time, beneath his thick Umberto-style, down-curved moustache that was already completely grey, his lips shaped themselves into a bitter, almost vituperative grimace, for use in desperate cases.

  ‘There’s nothing to be done,’ the doctor meant by those looks and that grimace. But also perh
aps something else. And this was that he also, ten years earlier (and maybe he spoke of it that same day before taking his leave or only did so five days later, as without doubt happened, turning to grandpa Raffaello, as the two of them slowly walked together at the imposing funeral), he also had lost a young boy, his Reuben.

  ‘I’ve been through this torture myself, I too know what it means to watch a five-year-old child die,’ Elia Corcos suddenly declared.

  With lowered head and hands resting on his bicycle handlebars, grandpa Raffaello walked alongside him. He seemed to be counting one by one the cobblestones of Corso Ercole I d’Este. At those truly unexpected words coming from the lips of his sceptical friend, he turned round, astonished, to look at him.