The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Read online

  The days seemed excessively beautiful and yet at the same time undermined by the approaching winter. To lose even one of them would be a real crime. Without making an appointment with each other, we always arrived around two, immediately after lunch. Often, in the first days, it so happened that we all once again found each other in a group in front of the gate, waiting for Perotti to come and open it. But the introduction, after something like a week, of an intercom and a remote-controlled unlocking device meant that, the entry into the garden no longer being problematic, we would arrive in ones or twos, as chance would have it. As for me, I didn’t miss a single afternoon; not even to follow one of my usual courses in Bologna. The same went for the others, as far as I can recall. Neither Bruno Lattes, nor Adriana Trentini, nor Carletto Sani, nor Tonino Collevatti, whose number was increased, as well as by my brother Ernesto, by another three or four boys and girls. The only one, as I’ve said, who came less regularly was the Giampiero Malnate (as Micòl began to call him, and soon enough the rest of us followed suit). He had to keep to the factory’s hours, he explained on one occasion: it wasn’t that strict, admittedly, considering that the Montecatini plant where he worked had not, to date, produced a single kilo of synthetic rubber, but all the same it was a schedule. Whatever the cause, his absences never lasted for more than two days in succession. Besides, he was the only one, myself excepted, who did not seem that bothered about playing tennis (and to be honest he was not much of a player), and was often quite content, when he appeared on his bike after work, to umpire a match or to sit apart with Alberto, smoking a pipe and talking.

  Our hosts were even more assiduous than we were. We might sometimes arrive before the Piazza’s distant clock struck two: however soon we got there, we were sure to find them already on court, not playing each other, as they had been doing that Saturday when we came out into the clearing behind the house where the court was, but busy checking that everything was in order, the net at the right height, the clay well rolled and the lines swept, the balls in good condition, or else stretched out on two deckchairs with wide straw hats on their heads, motionlessly sunbathing. They could not have behaved better if they had been the owners of the house, although it was clear that tennis, as physical exercise, as a sport, interested them only up to a certain point. Despite this, they stayed on till the final match (always at least one of them, but sometimes both) without ever taking their leave earlier on the pretext of an engagement, or because of some duty, or feeling unwell. Some evenings it was actually they, in almost total darkness, who would insist on playing ‘another couple of points, the last ones!’ and would shepherd back on court whoever was on the point of deserting it.

  As Carletto Sani and Tonino Collevatti had immediately declared, without bothering to lower their voices, it wasn’t as if the court itself was anything special.

  Being fifteen-year-olds, too young to have had any experience of tennis courts other than those which deservedly filled the Marchese Barbicinti with pride, they immediately began to expatiate on the many shortcomings of this kind of ‘potato patch’ (as one of them had called it, curling his upper lip with distaste). These were: practically no backcourt area, especially behind the far service line; a bumpy surface and, to make things worse, poor drainage, so even a little rain would turn it into a quagmire; no evergreen hedge to reinforce the surrounding wire fence.

  Despite all this, no sooner had they finished their ‘duel to the death’ (Micòl hadn’t managed to stop her brother reaching five-all, and at this point they stopped play) than they leapt in to denounce these same defects, not just without a shadow of reserve but with a sort of bizarre self-lacerating enthusiasm, as though the two of them were in competition.

  Oh yes, Micòl had remarked, while she was still drying her hot face with a thick towel, for people like us, ‘spoilt’ by the red-clay courts of the Eleonora d’Este, it must be very hard to feel at ease on their dusty potato patch! And the backcourt space? How could we play with so little room behind us? What an abyss of decadence we poor folk had fallen into! But she had no reason to reproach herself. She had told her father innumerable times that the wire netting all round needed to be set back at least another three metres. But would he listen? He, her father, had always hedged, falling back each time on a typical farmer’s perspective, which thinks that earth not used for planting things in is merely thrown away (also predictably bringing up the fact that she and Alberto had played on this sorry excuse for a court since they were children and so they could perfectly well continue to play on it as grown-ups). All that effort for nothing! But now things had changed. Now they had guests, ‘illustrious guests’. A good reason for her to take up the cause again with renewed vigour, wearing down and tormenting her ‘grey-haired progenitor’ so much that by next spring she felt confident she could guarantee that she and Alberto would be able to offer us ‘something more worthy’.

  She spoke more than ever in her characteristic mode, and grinned. We had no other option but to deny it, and reassure her in unison that on the contrary everything, the court included, was absolutely fine, better than fine, also praising to the skies this green corner of the grounds, beside which the remaining private parks, Duke Massari’s included (it was Bruno who remarked on it, just at the moment when Micòl and Alberto were leaving the court, holding hands), faded into so many neatly tended, bourgeois gardens.

  If the truth must be told, the tennis court was far from ‘worthy’, and besides, being just one, it forced us all to take overlong breaks off-court. Thus, at four o’clock on the dot every afternoon, perhaps above all so that the two fifteen-year-olds of our very mixed company should not miss the hours of much more intense sporting activity that they might otherwise have passed under the wing of the Marchese Barbicinti, Perotti would invariably appear, his bullish neck tense and flushed from the effort of holding upright in his gloved hands a huge silver tray.

  That tray was overflowing: rolls of anchovy spread, smoked salmon, caviare, paté de foie gras, pork prosciutto; with little vol-au-vents filled with a sauce of chicken and béchamel; with tiny buricchi which must have come from the prestigious little kosher pastry-shop which Signora Betsabea, the famous Signora Betsabea (Da Fano) had run for decades in Via Mazzini to the pride and delight of the entire citizenry. And that wasn’t the end of it. The good Perotti had still to lay out the contents of the tray on the wickerwork table already prepared for this, in front of the court’s side entrance, beneath a broad parasol in red and blue segments, which was attended to by one of his daughters, either Dirce or Gina, both about the same age as Micòl, and both in service ‘at home’, Dirce as a maid, Gina as cook. (The two male children, Titta and Bepi, the first about thirty, the second eighteen, took care of the park in the dual role of park and kitchen gardeners, and the most we ever saw of them was their bending figures, working in the distance, when they would turn the beam of their blue ironic eyes in our direction as we passed by on bikes – we never managed any contact beyond that.) She, the daughter, in her turn, had brought along with her, down the path which led from the magna domus to the tennis court, a trolley with rubber wheels, also laden with decanters, jugs, beakers and glasses. Within the porcelain and pewter jugs were tea, milk and coffee, and within the Bohemian cut-glass decanters, beaded with pearls of moisture, was lemonade, fruit juice and Skiwasser – this last a thirst-quenching drink made of water and raspberry syrup in equal measures, with the addition of a slice of lemon and a few grapes, which Micòl preferred to all other drinks and on which she particularly prided herself.

  Oh, that Skiwasser! In the breaks between games, besides guzzling the odd roll which always, and not without a show of religious nonconformism, she chose from among those filled with pork prosciutto, Micòl would often throw back a whole glass of her favourite ‘drinkette’, continually prompting us to do the same, ‘in homage’, as she would say laughing, ‘to the deceased Austro-Hungarian Empire’. The recipe, she told us, had been given to her in Austria itself, at Offgast
ein, in the winter of 1934: the only winter that she and Alberto ‘in coalition’ had been allowed to go on their own for a fortnight to ski. And though Skiwasser, as the name testified, was a winter drink, for which reason it should have been served boiling hot, still, even in Austria there were some people who in summer, so as not to stop drinking it, drank it this way, in icy ‘draughts’ but without the slice of lemon, and then they called it Himbeerwasser.

  However that was, we should take note, she added and raised a finger with comic emphasis, it was by her own initiative that the grapes – ‘indispensable!’ – had been added to the classic Tyrolean recipe. It was her idea, and she stood by it – it was no laughing matter. The grapes stood for Italy’s special contribution to the holy noble cause of Skiwasser, or rather of this, to put it more precisely, special ‘Italian variant, not to mention Ferrarese, not to mention … etc., etc.’

  4

  It took some time before the other denizens of the house let themselves be seen.

  Speaking of which, something strange occurred even that first day, which I only remembered halfway through the week after, when the fact that neither Professor Ermanno nor Signora Olga had turned up made me suspect that all those whom Adriana Trentini called, en masse, ‘the old guard’, had reached a unanimous decision to keep their distance from the tennis playing – perhaps so as not to embarrass us, or, who knows, so as not to disturb by their presence parties which in the end were not really parties but simply gatherings of the youngsters in the garden.

  The curious event occurred right at the start, a short while after we had taken our leave of Perotti and Jor, who remained there watching us cycle into the distance along the driveway. Having crossed the Panfilio canal by way of a strange, stocky bridge of black girders, our two-wheeled patrol had then come within two hundred metres of the lonely Neo-Gothic hulk of the magna domus, or, to be more precise, of the sad, gravel-covered forecourt which, completely in the shade, extended before it, when all our attention was drawn to two motionless figures right in the middle of the forecourt: an old woman seated in an armchair, with a heap of cushions supporting her back and a young woman, blond and buxom, who looked like a maid, standing behind her. As soon as she saw us advancing, the old woman was shaken by a kind of start. After this, she immediately began a series of sweeping gestures with her arms to signal no, we shouldn’t keep going ahead towards the forecourt where she was, given that there, behind her, there was nothing but the house itself, but rather we should take a left turn down the path covered by a trellis of small climbing roses which she pointed out to us, at the end of which (Micòl and Alberto were already playing: couldn’t we hear from where we were the regular thunks their rackets made as they knocked the ball back and forth?) we should automatically arrive at the tennis court. She was Signora Regina Herrera, Signora Olga’s mother. I had already recognized her from the singularly brilliant whiteness of the thick hair gathered up at the nape of her neck, hair which I’d admired every time I’d seen it at the Temple since I’d first glimpsed it through the grating of the women’s gallery as a young child. She waved her arms and her hands with hectic energy, at the same time signing to the girl, who it turned out was Dirce, to help her up. She was tired of being there: she wanted to go back in. And the maid obeyed her order with unhesitating solicitude.

  One evening, however, contrary to all expectations, it was Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga who appeared. They gave the impression of having passed the tennis court by sheer chance, returning after a long stroll in the grounds. They were arm in arm. Smaller than his wife, and much more stooped than he had been ten years earlier, at the time of our whispered conversation from one bench to another in the Italian School synagogue, the Professor was wearing one of his usual light linen suits with a black-banded panama hat tilted down over the thick lenses of his pince-nez, and leaning, as he walked, on a bamboo cane. Dressed in mourning, the Signora was carrying in her arms a thick bunch of chrysanthemums gathered in some remote part of the garden during their walk. She pressed them against and across her breast, wreathing them with her right arm in a tenderly possessive, almost maternal manner. Although still straight, and a whole head taller than her husband, she too had aged considerably. Her hair had grown uniformly grey – an ugly, dismal grey. Beneath her bony projecting brow her coal-black eyes shone as ever with a stricken, fanatical ardour.

  Those of us who were sitting around the sunshade rose to our feet, and those who were playing stopped.

  ‘Please don’t put yourselves out,’ the Professor began in his kind and musical tones. ‘Do please sit down, and don’t let us disturb the game.’

  He was not obeyed. Micòl and Alberto, but especially Micòl, saw to introducing us. Besides announcing our names and surnames, she lingered over whatever details concerning each of us might rouse her father’s interest: most of all our occupations and studies. She had begun with me and Bruno Lattes, speaking about both of us in an exterior, remarkably objective manner, as though to stop her father, in this particular circumstance, from showing any possible sign of special recognition or favour. We were ‘the two literary figures of the gang’, ‘salt of the earth’. She then moved on to Malnate. Here before us was a great example of devotion to science! – she exclaimed with ironic emphasis. Only chemistry, for which he nursed an evidently irresistible passion, could have induced him to leave a metropolis as full of opportunities as Milan (‘Milàn l’è on grand Milàn!’fn1) to bury himself in a ‘mini-city’ like our own.

  ‘He works in the industrial zone,’ Alberto explained, straightforward and serious. ‘For a Montecatini plant.’

  ‘They’re meant to be producing synthetic rubber,’ Micòl sniggered, ‘but up till now it seems they haven’t managed it.’

  Professor Ermanno coughed. He pointed his finger at Malnate.

  ‘You were a university friend of Alberto’s, isn’t that right?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Well, in a way,’ he replied, agreeing with a nod. ‘Though we were in different faculties, and I was three years ahead, but all the same we became great friends.’

  ‘Of that I’m sure. My son has spoken of you very often. He’s also told us of having been at your house many times, and of the great kindness and hospitality of your parents. Would you thank them on our behalf when you see them next? In the meantime we are delighted to have you here at our house. And do please come back … come here any time you’d like.’

  He turned towards Micòl, and asked her, pointing to Adriana:

  ‘And who is this young woman? If I’m not wrong she must be a Zanardi …’

  The conversation proceeded in this manner until all the introductions had been made, including those of Carletto Sani and Tonino Collevatti, characterized by Micòl as ‘the two great promises’ of Ferrara’s tennis circles. Finally Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga, who had stayed at her husband’s side the whole time without saying a word, limiting herself to the occasional benevolent smile, made their way, still arm in arm, towards the house.

  Although the Professor had taken his leave with a more than cordial ‘See you soon!’ it would not have crossed any of our minds to hold on too literally to that promise.

  But the following Sunday, whilst Adriana Trentini and Bruno Lattes on one side of the net and Désirée Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo on the other were most keenly contesting a match whose outcome, according to the declarations of Adriana, who had promoted and organized it, should ‘at least morally’ recompense her and Bruno for the dirty trick played on them by the Marchese Barbicinti (but the event was not turning out the same as before: Adriana and Bruno were losing, and rather badly): towards the end of the match, the entire ‘old guard’ emerged from out of the path of the climbing roses. They seemed like a small cortège. Leading them were Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga. They were followed, a little after, by the Herrera uncles from Venice: the first, with a cigarette between his thick protruding lips and his hands clasped behind his back, looking around him with the sligh
tly embarrassed air of a town dweller who, against his will, has found himself in the countryside; and the second, a few yards further back, supporting Signora Regina on his arm and adjusting his stride to the snail-like pace of his mother. If the phthisiologist and the engineer were in Ferrara, I said to myself, it must be to attend some religious ceremony. But what? After Rosh Hashanah, which fell in October, I couldn’t remember what rite there was in autumn. Succoth maybe? Probably. Unless the equally probable firing of the engineer Federico from the state railways had prompted the calling of a most unusual family reunion …

  They sat down in a dignified manner, hardly making any noise. The only exception being Signora Regina. As soon as she had been settled down in a deckchair, she boomed out in a deaf person’s voice a few words in their household jargon. She bewailed the mucha humidity of the garden at that time of day. But beside her, her son Federico was in attendance, and in an equally loud voice was ready to hush her up (though his had a neutral timbre: a tone of voice that my father also paraded on occasion when, in ‘mixed’ surroundings, he wanted to communicate exclusively with some member of the family). She should keep callada, that is, quiet. There were the musafir.

  I moved close to Micòl’s ear.

  ‘I can manage to make out “callada”. But what on earth does “musafir” mean?’

  ‘Guests,’ she whispered in reply. ‘But goyische ones.’

  Then she smiled, childishly covering her mouth with her hand and winking: style Micòl 1929.

  Later, at the end of the match, and after the ‘new acquisitions’ Désirée Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo had been introduced in their turn, I happened to find myself apart with Professor Ermanno. The day was dying away across the park in its usual milky diffused shadows. I had moved some yards away from the court’s little entrance gate. My eyes fixed on the distant Mura degli Angeli, I heard behind my back Micòl’s sharp voice prevailing over all the others. Who knows who she was angry with or why.