1.
TURNING back to the distant years of her youth, always, for as long as she lived, Lida Mantovani remembered the birth with emotion, and especially the days just before it. Whenever she thought about it, she was deeply moved.
For more than a month she had lived stretched out on a bed, at the end of a corridor, and for all that time she had done nothing but stare through the usually wide-open window opposite at the leaves of the huge, ancient magnolia which surged up right in the middle of the garden below. Then, toward the end, three or four days before her labor pains began, she had suddenly lost interest even in the magnolia’s black leaves, which were shiny, as though they’d been oiled. She had even given up eating. A thing, that’s what she’d shrunk into being: a kind of very swollen and numbed thing—although it was only April, it was already warm—abandoned down there, at the end of a hospital corridor.
She hardly ate anything. But Professor Bargellesi, then head of the maternity ward, would repeat that it was better that way.
He observed her from the foot of the bed.
“It’s really hot,” he’d say, with those frail and reddened fingers of his smoothing his big white beard, stained with nicotine around the mouth. “If you want to breathe as you should, it’s better to keep your weight down. And anyway”—he would add, smiling—“anyway, it seems to me you’re quite fat enough already . . .”
2.
AFTER THE birth, time began to pass once more.
At first, thinking of David—irritated, unhappy, he hardly ever spoke to her, staying in bed for whole days, his face hidden under a book or else sleeping—Lida Mantovani tried to keep going on her own in the furnished room of the big apartment block in Via Mortara where she had lived with him for the last six months. But then, after a few more weeks, convinced that she’d heard the last of him, and realizing that the few hundred lire he’d left her were about to run out, and since, besides, her milk was beginning to run dry, she decided to return home to her mother. So in the summer of that same year, Lida reappeared in Via Salinguerra, and began once more to occupy the unattractive room, with its dusty wooden floor and its two iron beds arranged side by side, where she had spent her childhood, adolescence and the first years of her young adulthood.
Although it had once been a carpenter’s wood store, entering was by no means easy.
When you made your way into the vestibule, huge and dark as a haybarn, you had to climb up by a little staircase which obliquely cut across the left-hand wall. The staircase led to a low half-door, and having passed the threshold you found your head brushing a ceiling with small beams, and were suddenly faced with a kind of well. God! How sad it all was, Lida said to herself the evening she returned home, lingering for a moment up there to look down . . . and yet, at the same time, what a sense of peace and protection . . . With the baby draped around her neck, she had slowly descended the steps of the inner staircase, and had walked toward her mother, who in the meantime had lifted her eyes from her sewing, and finally leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek. And the kiss, without a single word, greeting or comment having passed between them, was returned.
Almost immediately the question of the baptism had to be confronted.
As soon as she became aware of the situation, the mother crossed herself.
“Are you mad?” she exclaimed.
While the mother spoke, anxiously declaring that there wasn’t a moment to be lost, Lida felt the shriveling of any will to resist. At the maternity ward, when they had crowded around the bed to hold the baby and had excitedly asked what name she meant to give him, she suddenly thought she must do nothing against David, and this made her reply, No, they should hold off for a bit, she wanted to think about it for a while longer. But now, why on earth should she continue to have any scruples? What would she still be waiting for? That very evening the baby was taken to Santa Maria in Vado. It was her mother who had arranged everything, it was she who argued that he should be called Ireneo, in memory of a dead brother of whose existence Lida had never even been aware . . . Mother and daughter had rushed to the church as though pursued. But they returned slowly, as if drained of all energy, along Via Borgo di Sotto, where the municipal lamplighter was doing his rounds, lighting the streetlamps one by one.
The next morning they began working together again.
Seated again as they had once been, as they had always been before, under the rectangular window which opened above them at street level, their foreheads bent over their sewing, rather than speaking of the time they had recently passed through, so bitter for both of them, they preferred, when the occasion arose, to talk of inconsequential things. They felt more closely bound together than before, much better friends. Both of them, all the same, understood that their harmony could only thus be preserved on condition that they avoided any reference to the sole topic on which their closeness depended.
Sometimes, however, unable to resist, Maria Mantovani risked a joke, a veiled allusion.
She might venture with a sigh:
“Ah, all men are the same!”
Or even:
“Men are always on the prowl—that’s for sure.”
At this, having raised her head, she would stare raptly at her daughter, remembering, at the same time, the blacksmith of Massa Fiscaglia, who, twenty years earlier, had taken her virginity and made her pregnant; remembering the rented farmhouse, hidden among the fields two or three kilometers outside Massa, where she had been born and grown up, and which, with a little girl to raise, she had had to leave forever; the greasy, ruffled hair, the fat sensual lips, the lazy gestures of the only man in her life would become superimposed upon the figure of David, the young gentleman of Ferrara, Jewish, it’s true, but belonging to one of the richest and most respected families of the town (those Camaiolis who lived on Corso Giovecca, just imagine, in that big house that they themselves owned), who for a long while had been making love to Lida, but whom she herself had never known, never once seen, even from a distance. She looked, she watched. Thin, sharp, whittled away by suffering and worry, it was as if in Lida she saw herself as a girl. Everything had been repeated, everything. From A to Z.
One evening she suddenly burst out laughing. She grabbed Lida by the hand and dragged her in front of the wardrobe mirror.
“Just look how similar we’ve become,” she said in a stifled voice.
And while nothing was audible in the room except the whisper of the carbide lamp, they remained staring at their faces for a long time, side by side, almost indistinguishable in the misted surface.
That’s not to say that their relations always ran smoothly. Lida was not always prepared to listen without fighting back.
One evening, for example, Maria Mantovani had started telling her own story—something that could never have happened before. At the end she came out with a phrase that made Lida jump to her feet.
“If his parents had been in favor,” she had said, “we’d have got married.”
Lying on the bed, her face hidden in her hands, Lida silently repeated these words, hearing once again the sigh full of resentment which had accompanied them. No, she wouldn’t weep. And, to her mother, who had run after her and who had breathlessly leaned over her, she displayed, as she raised herself up, her cheeks dry, a look full of contempt and boredom.
Otherwise her irritations were rare and if they afflicted her, they did so without warning, like tempestuous squalls on a day of fine weather.
“Lida!” the daughter exclaimed once with a spiteful laugh (her mother was calling her by her name). “How important it was for you when I went to school that I wrote it on my exercise book with that fancy ‘y.’ What on earth did you think I was going to be—a showgirl?”
Maria Mantovani didn’t reply. She smiled. Her daughter’s tantrum transported her back to distant events, events whose significance she alone was in a position to assess. “Lyda!” she kept repeating to herself. She thought about her own youth. She thought of Andrea, Andrea Tardozzi, the Massa Fiscaglia blacksmith who had been her sweetheart, her lover, and would have been her husband. She had come to live in the city with her baby, and every Sunday he travelled sixty kilometers by bicycle, thirty on the way there, and thirty back. He sat there, just where Lida was now sitting. She seemed to see him once again, with his leather jacket, his corduroy trousers, his tousled hair. Until one night, as he was returning to the village, he was taken by surprise by a heavy rain and fell ill with pleurisy. From then on she never saw him again. He had gone to live in Feltre in the Veneto: a small town at the foot of the mountains, where he took a wife and had children. If his parents hadn’t been against it, and if, following that, he hadn’t got ill, he would have married her. That was for sure. What did Lida know? What could she understand? She alone understood everything. For the two of them.
After supper, Lida was usually the first to go to bed. But the other bed, beside the one where she and the baby were already asleep, often remained untouched until late into the night, while in the center of the table, still to be cleared, the gas lamp shed its blueish glow.
3.
RATHER IRREGULAR in shape, its cobblestones partly overgrown with grass, Via Salinguerra is a small, subsidiary street which begins in an ill-shapen square, the result of an ancient demolition, and ends at the foot of the city’s walls quite close to Porta San Giorgio. This places it within the city and not that far from the medieval center: to confirm this impression, you only need to look at the appearance of the houses which flank both its sides, all of them very poor and of modest proportions, and some old and decrepit, undoubtedly among the oldest in Ferrara. And yet, strolling down Via Salinguerra, even today, the kind of silence that surrounds it (heard from here, the city’s church bells have a different timbre, as though muffled and lost) and especially the smell of manure, of ploughed earth, of cowsheds, which reveal the proximity of large hidden vegetable gardens, all contribute to the impression of being outside the circle of the city walls, on the edge of the open countryside.
The restful voices of animals, of chickens, dogs, even oxen, distant bells, agricultural effluvia: sounds and smells even drifted down to the depths of the carpenter’s storehouse where Lida and Maria Mantovani worked in men’s tailoring. Seated just beside the window, almost as motionless and silent as the grey pieces of furniture behind them—as the table, that is, and the raffia armchairs, and the long narrow beds, the cradle, the wardrobe, the bedside table and three-legged washbowl with the ewer of water beside it, and further back, barely visible, the little door under the stairs which hid the small kitchen and toilet—when they raised their heads from the fabric, it was only to address the odd word to each other, to check that the baby didn’t need anything, to look up outside at the rare passers-by, or, at the sudden shriek of the doorbell hung above the drab rectangle of the street entrance, to decide by a rapid exchange of glances which of the two would have to go upstairs to open it . . .
They passed three years like this.
And it might be supposed that many more would have passed in just the same manner, without any disruption or significant change, when life, which seemed to have forgotten them, suddenly recalled their existence through the person of a neighbor: a certain Benetti, Oreste Benetti, the owner of a bookbinding workshop in Via Salinguerra. The peculiar insistence with which he began to pay them visits in the evening after supper almost immediately assumed, at least for Maria, an unequivocal meaning. Yes—she thought, getting flustered—that Benetti’s coming round expressly to see Lida . . . After all Lida was still young, very young indeed. At once she became lively, bustling, even happy. Without ever interrupting the talks between her daughter and the guest, she confined herself to walking about the room, glad to be there, it was clear, content to be present but self-contained, and to await and observe the emergence of a rare and delightful event.
In the meantime the one who spoke was nearly always the bookbinder. About the years gone by: it seemed that he had no interest in any other topic.
“When Lida was a little girl”—he said—“just this high,” she often came to his workshop. She would enter, come forward, raise herself up on tiptoes so her eyes could be at the level of the workbench.
“Signor Benetti,” she would ask him in her little voice, “would you give me a small piece of wax paper?”
“Gladly,” he’d reply. “But may I know what you want it for?”
“Nothing. Just to cover my exercise book.”
He would tell the story and laugh. Although he didn’t speak to either of the women in particular, his looks were directed exclusively toward Lida. It was her attention and agreement that he sought. And while she observed the man in front of her (he had a very big head, which fitted his stout torso, but was out of proportion with the rest of his body), and in particular his large bony hands, forcibly clasped together on the tablecloth, she felt that at least in this respect she could hardly do other than try to please him. Facing him with a reserved courtesy, she spoke calmly, composedly and—deriving from this a strange, unaccustomed pleasure—in a somehow submissive manner.
Of nothing was the bookbinder more acutely aware than of his own importance. Nevertheless he was always in search of further kudos.
Once, on one of the few occasions when he addressed the old woman, even calling her by her Christian name, it was to remind her of the year she’d come to settle in Ferrara. Do you remember—he said—the cold we had that year? He did, very clearly. The abundant heaps of dirty snow that remained along both sides of the city streets until mid-April. And how the temperature had dropped so low the river Po itself had frozen.
“The Po itself!” he repeated with emphasis, widening his eyes.
It was as though he could still see it, he continued, the extraordinary sight of the river gripped in the sub-zero winds. Between the snow-heaped banks the river had ceased to flow, had totally seized up. So much so that, toward evening, instead of making use of the iron bridge at Pontelagoscuro to cross the river, some laborers—they must have been transporting firewood to a sawmill in Santa Maria Maddalena and were returning to Ferrara—preferred to risk their then-empty carts across the huge sheet of ice. What madmen! They advanced slowly, a few meters in front of their horses, holding the reins gathered in one fist behind their backs, as with their free hands they scattered sawdust, and meanwhile they whistled and yelled like the damned. Why were they whistling and yelling? Who knows? Perhaps to embolden the beasts, perhaps themselves. Or else simply to keep warm.
“I remember that famous winter,” he began one evening, with the respectful tone he always assumed when he spoke of people and things with any religious connection (orphaned as a child and brought up in a seminary, he had retained for the priests there, for priests as a whole, a filial reverence), “I remember that famous winter, poor Don Castelli led us out every Saturday afternoon to Pontelagoscuro to look at the Po. As soon as we’d passed Porta San Benedetto the children broke out of their lines. Five kilometers there and five back—it wasn’t just a stroll round the garden! And yet even to mention the tram to Don Castelli was big trouble. Although, given his age, he was gasping for air, he was always in front, always at the head of the whole troop with his fine soutane flowing and with yours truly at his side . . . A veritable saint, sure enough, and a real father to my humble self!”
“I had just given birth to the baby,” Maria Mantovani put in, softly, in dialect, making the most of the silence that followed the bookbinder’s speech. “In town I felt lost,” she continued in Italian, “I didn’t really know anyone. But on the other hand how could I go back home? You know how it was, Oreste: in the country, it’s mainly the mentality that’s different.”
It seemed as though Oreste hadn’t heard her.
“Apart from in 1917, there’s never again been cold like that,” he reckoned, deep in thought. “But what am I saying!” he added, raising his voice and shaking his head. “It’s not even comparable. In the winter of 1917 it was warm—on the Carso!* You’d have to ask those on sick leave how it was here, those shirkers—whom we all know—” these final words he stressed with a sarcastic tone—“never saw the Front, not even on a postcard.”
Taking in the unusually brutal dig directed at Andrea Tardozzi, the blacksmith at Massa Fiscaglia who had been let off service because of pleurisy and for that reason hadn’t been sent to war (in 1910 he had moved to Feltre, the Feltre up near the Alps, where he had settled with his family), Maria Mantovani stiffened, offended. And for the rest of that evening, cast out to brood alone in her corner over the innumerable events in her life that might have happened and that didn’t, she spoke not another word.
As far as the bookbinder was concerned, having established, as he felt impelled to, the proper distance between them, he briskly resumed all the courtesy and gallantry that was his by nature. It was usually on himself and his own past that he dwelled. Till he was twenty, twenty-five, all had gone badly—he sighed—from every point of view. But afterward, work had changed that, his work, his craft, and from then on things turned around completely. “We craftsmen,” he used to say, with no lack of pride, looking Lida straight in the eyes. Never distracted, Lida quietly received his gaze. And he was grateful, one could see it, that she always sat there, on the other side of the table, so silently, so serenely, so attentively, thereby corresponding in her whole aspect to his secret ideal of womanhood.
The bookbinder often talked on till midnight. Having exhausted his store of personal anecdotes, he began to talk of religion, of history, of the economy and so on, lapsing into frequent, bitter observations—expressed of course in a low tone—about the anti-Catholic politics of the Fascists. During the first period of his visits, without ceasing to listen to him, Lida would use the tip of her toe to rock the cradle in which Ireneo slept until he was four years old. Later, when he had grown a bit and had a little bed of his own (he grew up slight and frail, having contracted a long infectious illness when he was five that, apart from permanently weakening his health, undoubtedly influenced the frailty and lack of conviction of his character), Lida would get up from her chair every now and then and, approaching the child who was asleep, would lean over and place a hand on his forehead.
4.
IN THE summer of 1928, Lida had her twenty-fifth birthday.
One evening, while she and Oreste Benetti sat in their usual places, divided as ever by the table and the lamp, suddenly, very simply, the bookbinder asked her if she would marry him.
Soberly, without showing the least surprise, Lida stared at him.
It was as if she were seeing him for the first time. She considered with extraordinary care every detail of his face, his very black, watery eyes, his tall, white forehead topped by an arch of iron-grey hair cut short, like a toothbrush, in the style of certain priests and soldiers, and she was astounded to find herself there, to be taking note of all this only now, so late. He must have been about fifty. At least.
She was suddenly stricken by a wave of anxiety. Not able to say anything, she turned in search of help toward her mother, who, having risen to her feet, had come to the table and was leaning on it with both her hands. The grimace of impending tears that was already pulling down the corners of her mouth only added to her confusion.
“What’s wrong with you?” she shouted angrily at her daughter in dialect. “Would you say what’s wrong?”
Lida rose abruptly to her feet, rushed toward, then up the stairs—she left, slamming the door, and went down the other staircase to the entrance.
Having finally reached the street, she immediately leaned her back against the wall beside the dark gaping cavity of the wide-open doorway, and looked at the sky.
It was a magnificent starscape. In the distance a band could be heard. Where were they playing? she asked herself, with a sudden, spasmodic desire to mingle with the crowd, happy, dressed in a pinafore and holding an ice cream in her hand like a young girl without a care in the world. Was the sound coming from San Giorgio, in the clearing beside the church? Or else from Porta Reno, perhaps the Piazza Travaglio itself?
But by then her breathing was no longer so labored. And there it was, coming through the walls of old brick against which she rested the whole of her spine, there it was, reaching her, the whispering voice of Oreste Benetti. He was speaking to her mother, now, quietly as though nothing had happened. What was he saying? Who could tell? Whatever the words, his voice, the placid, subdued hum of his voice was enough to persuade her to calm down, to encourage her to go back inside. When she reappeared at the stair landing she was once again mistress of herself, of her thoughts and her gestures.
Having shut the door, gone down the stairs neither too hurriedly nor too deliberately, taking care not to catch the eyes of either the bookbinder or her mother—during her absence the two of them had remained in their places, he seated at the table, she standing: and there they still were, silent, examining her face with inquisitive gazes. She passed close by the table, sat down again in her place, and almost imperceptibly narrowed her shoulders. And the topic of marriage—for the nearly two hours that their guest still remained—was not broached again, nor was it in the course of the innumerable other evenings that were to follow.
This doesn’t mean to suggest that Oreste Benetti nurtured any doubt whatsoever about what Lida’s response would sooner or later be. Quite the contrary. For him, from that moment on, it was as though Lida had already consented, as though they were already fiancés.
This was evident from the different way he treated her: always solicitous and kind, yes, but within, deep down, there was an air of authority which had been lacking before. At this juncture, he alone—it seemed as though he wanted to declare—was in a position to guide her through life.
In his view, Lida’s character had a serious defect—he was willing to say it openly, in such cases, not hesitating to call on Maria Mantovani as a witness with a sideways glance—which was always to be looking backward, always to be chewing over the past. Why not, for a change, force herself to look a little the other way, toward the future? Pride was a great ugly beast. Like a snake, it slithered in where you least expected it.
“You need to be reasonable,” he sighed by way of conclusion. “You need to stay calm and keep going forward.”
Other times, however, in apparent self-contradiction, even if by nods, by hints and carefully veiled insinuations—Lida following the skilful, tireless workings of his mind without ever reacting, as though hypnotized—it was actually he who showed her the picture of her youth: unregulated, anarchic, unaware of the urgent need to achieve a higher maturity, a dignified and tranquil way of life.
And on this topic, yes, certainly—he also let it be understood—since he loved her, he naturally understood, made excuses for her, forgave everything. His feelings, however, were not so blinded, she should realize, as to stop him remembering (and making her remember) that she had committed a gross error, a mortal sin from which she would only be absolved the day she was married. What on earth had she imagined? Had she perhaps dreamed that a man of her own breed—who, besides, as she was well aware, was almost thirty years older—could think of love outside of marriage, of a Catholic marriage? Marriage was a duty, a mission. The true believer was incapable of conceiving of life, and consequently of the relationship between man and woman, in any other way . . .
All three of them, however, were in such a state of nervous tension, were so continually on the alert, that it would have needed little indeed to throw the fragile balance of their relations into crisis. After every clash, they remained uneasy, sulky, holding on to their grudges.
On one occasion, for example, referring to Ireneo, the bookbinder said that truly he wished the baby well: just as if he were his father. Betrayed by the heat of the moment, he had let himself go a shade too far.
“But just a second, aren’t you Uncle Oreste?” exclaimed Ireneo, who was already seven years old, and had acquired the habit of showing him his homework before he was put to bed.
“Of course . . . you understand . . . It was only a manner of speaking. What strange things go through your mind!”
The bookbinder’s confusion suddenly gave Lida a clear sense of her own importance. While, a bit breathlessly, the good man kept on talking to the child, she and her mother exchanged glances and smiled.
But the moments of silent tension and malice were, all considered, quite rare. To avert them, or leave them behind, presents always played a useful role. Right from the start, Oreste Benetti had always been lavish with those. Although he had made it clear that after the wedding they would all move together to a little villa beyond Porta San Benedetto (for which he was negotiating terms of sale with a building firm, but, despite that, he had promptly had the electric lights installed and the walls whitewashed and had bought various bits of furniture, a cheap cast-iron stove, a picture, some kitchen utensils, a couple of flower vases and so on), it was as if the marriage, about which, it was evident, he never for a moment stopped thinking, were something he hadn’t the slightest intention of rushing. He was in love—he said so with his presents—which were often useless, it was true, and sometimes a bit absurd. If he married her, it was because he loved her. He had never in his life been engaged before, not even once. Neither as a youth nor later as a man had he ever tasted the inebriating pleasure of giving presents to a fiancée. Now that this pleasure was allowed him, he had every right to see that things proceeded slowly, gradually, with a rigorous respect for all the rules.
He came round every evening at the same time: at nine-thirty on the dot.
Lida would hear him coming from afar, from as far as the street. And there it was, the vigorous ringing of the bell that announced him, and there were his steady footsteps on the staircase, on the entrance side, and up there, at the level of the landing, his cheerful greeting.
“Good evening, ladies!”
He would begin to descend, still humming that air from The Barber of Seville between his teeth, then interrupt himself halfway down the stairs with a polite cough. And suddenly the room would be full of him, of the little man who wore his hair a bit like a soldier, a bit like a priest, and of his heated, brisk and imperious presence.
His arrival scene was always the same—for years it never changed. Although she could predict it in every particular, each time Lida was overcome by a kind of lulled stupefaction.
She would let him come forward, without even giving him a nod or getting to her feet.
But before, how had it been then in those cherished days?
Oh, at that time, when an equally vigorous ringing signaled that David, wrapped in his hefty blue coat with the fur collar, stamping his feet on the cobblestones out of impatience and the cold, was waiting for her, as agreed, outside the front entrance on the street—he had never wanted to come in, never felt the need to be introduced!—then, on the contrary, she’d had very little time to grab her overcoat from the wardrobe, put it on, shut the wardrobe and bring her face up to the mirror on the wall, furiously dab some powder on and adjust her hair. She was only conceded those few, precious seconds. And yet they were more than enough, as in the large mirror, looking small and shiny, with her hair drawn back behind her head (the light behind her made her seem almost bald), she saw the grey head of her mother appear and disappear, rapid and darting behind her back.
“What are you gawping at?” she turned to shout at her. “You know what? I’ve had enough—enough of you and this whole life.”
She went out, slamming the door. David didn’t like to be kept waiting.
5.
STILL TREMBLING, grasping his arm, she would let herself be led away.
Rather than turning right and heading toward the city center, they usually went down Via Salinguerra until they reached the city walls, and then from there, walking at a good pace along the path that topped the walls, they would arrive at Porta Reno in about twenty minutes. It was David’s preference. Since he had made peace with his family—so as to free himself later, he said, when he was in a better position to do so, but in the meantime he would graduate, he really needed to graduate!—it was worth their being careful for now, at least to avoid being seen around together. At this point, it was indispensable, he kept on repeating. Given the situation, she herself ought to be convinced that certain “ostentatious displays” ought to be well and truly done with. By “ostentatious displays” he was referring to the earliest period of their relationship, when, throwing down a gauntlet, he was even willing to take her to the Salvini cinema in the evenings, when they would go to sit in the main cafes, including the Borsa, in daylight, and he’d proclaim that he’d already had more than enough of the boring and hypocritical life he’d been leading up till now—university, friends, family and so on. Anyway, wasn’t it much better this way? he would hurriedly add, with a grin. Aren’t hindrances, subterfuges, the best spur and incentive for love? In any case, one fact was for sure: along that path on top of the walls, or, soon after, at the little cinema in Piazza Travaglio where they were heading, no one from his family or “circle” would ever encounter them.
Regardless of all that, she kept up alongside him in silence, frozen in body and soul.
And yet, after a little while, almost as soon as she found herself in the crowded, smoky stalls of the Diana, seated next to David with her eyes fixed on the screen, her frayed nerves quickly relaxed. Not seldom the films narrated love stories in which, despite everything, she kept dreaming of herself as the heroine: something that in the final moments induced her not only to look round at David (in the penumbra cut in mid-air by the elongated, blue cone of light which sprang from the projector behind, she could discern his long, thin neck, with his large, protruding Adam’s apple just above the tie-knot, his unhappy profile, always seeming to be drowsy, his brown, brilliantined hair slightly curly at the temples), but also to seek out his hand and grasp it anxiously. And David? Ready as he was to return her look and give an answering squeeze to her hand, he seemed relaxed, even to be in a good mood. But she could never rely on that. After having let her hold his hand for a while, he would sometimes withdraw it brusquely. He would move his whole body away, or else, if he hadn’t already taken off his coat, he would stand up and do so. “It’s so hot in here,” he’d sigh heavily, “you can hardly breathe.”
Intimidated, she would make no further attempt at closeness. She would quickly return her gaze to the screen, and from then on David would be down there, in the middle of the large grey luminescent rectangle that filled the end of the auditorium, intent on lighting a cigarette with his gloved hands, dancing in his dinner jacket, or staring into the eyes of stunningly beautiful women, pressing himself against their breasts, kissing them lingeringly on the mouth . . . The film so entranced her that later, when it was over, and she was outside again, if David slipped an arm under hers and speaking in caressing tones, offered to accompany her home the same way they’d come, she would violently start awake, as from a kind of sleep.
“It’s only a little longer, that way,” David would urge her.
“But it’s late, my mother was expecting me back at midnight,” she tried to reply. “And then the cold, it’ll be all wet . . .”
How much better it would be, she thought in the meantime, to return home by cutting back through the center of town! With the mist that had descended—in those two hours it had become so dense that the yellow lights of the streetlamps could barely be seen—no one, they could be sure, would have noticed them, not even if they’d passed by the Listone cafe, or if they’d taken the Corso Giovecca. They could have slowly walked along the sidewalks slippery with the damp, their lips and eyelashes laden with the tepid droplets, holding each other tightly like two real, proper fiancés, and talking, God—or rather David—willing. What would he have talked about? Perhaps the film (what a ham the main actor was!—he would have said—and also the star, what a silly thing she was!), or perhaps about himself, his studies, his plans for the future . . . Finally, before parting, they might even have been able to slip into some small cafe, one of those in the Saraceno district or in Via Borgo di Sotto. Seating them both in a corner, David would then have ordered two small drinks. After which, in the warmth, sipping the anisette and thinking of soon going to bed and to sleep, she could have felt, have been infused with, if not happiness, at least a sense of being in tune with herself and with life.
But instead she would give in.
And they would quickly make their way toward the city walls, away from the bicycle bells of the local lads who would hang around the cinema’s still wide-open glass doors, talking in loud voices about sports or who knows what, or else eating roast chestnuts bought for a few centesimi from the old woman with the black shawl, the woolen half-gloves, the grey overcoat, forever stooped there over her little cast-iron griddle, they would be catcalling to her with whistles, shouts, disrespectful hisses and swear words. It was no use hurrying past. The ever-growing distance seemed to render the cries even more acute and penetrating. They followed her closely. Like cold, clammy hands which tried to grasp her, to touch her under her clothes.
With the first darkness, in the first field they came to, she was pushed down on to the grass. With her chin on his shoulder, without closing her eyes, she let him do what he wanted.
Later, she would be the first to get up. And if, at a certain point, she felt the desire to struggle beneath him, to bite him, do him harm (David never resisted this: instead, relaxing his long back, he would lean on her with his whole weight), that was when her rage, the sort of anger which lately had induced her to push him off her, would suddenly give way to a tremendous feeling of anxiety, of fear. How far away he already was! she thought, while she strained to get up, to smooth down her dress. Nothing at all mattered to him, now! And yet, why consider him the guilty party? Hadn’t she herself been perfectly able to imagine how the evening would end? From when they met, in front of the street entrance, hardly exchanging a greeting, from when they had hurriedly walked toward the city walls, everything had been utterly predictable.
They went on their way.
She was fully aware of all this. He was cold and distracted. Nothing he could say now would do anything but wound her. And yet she would provoke him.
For example, she would ask him: “What’s your mother’s name again?”
As David kept silent, she would reply on his behalf, with slow emphasis: “Teresa.”
Wasn’t it funny that she’d ask such pointless questions, and then that it should be her replying, stressing each syllable like a schoolgirl being tested?
“And Marina,” she continued, “what is your sister Marina called?”
She burst out laughing, then repeated: “Ma-ri-na.”
Hastening his steps over the frost-hardened ground, David yawned. But he finally decided to speak.
What he uttered was strange and muffled. There was without doubt some truth in it, but also—and it sufficed to listen carefully to his tone, to realize this—a great deal of fiction. He spoke in general about himself, and especially about his “romantic involvement” with a young lady of the highest society, about whom, without disclosing her name, he kept on boasting, not just about her beauty, but also her urbane manners, her aristocratic and refined tastes. Their meetings, their tiffs (since, it seemed, they often quarrelled) always occurred in the midst of glittering occasions: a charity ball at the Unione Club, that would have been attended by the nobility, a gala showing at the City Theater, a gallop in the country which ended in a spectacular gathering at some beautiful villa encircled by a vast park. All things considered, it was “a far from smooth relationship,” hindered by both families, certainly, but “solely” due to their different religions: a relationship in whose context the “thing” that they had just done, in the field, would never, even by mistake, be mentioned . . . In the meantime, they had come down from the city walls, and entered Via Salinguerra. And if, till that moment she had been listening in silence, almost holding her breath, as soon as she gathered, from the shapes of the houses and the streetlamps, that in a few moments they would have to part, this caused her to suffer a nervous agitation of such intensity as to make her fear she might lose all control. Oh, how she hated, at that moment, her miserable, worn-out coat, her ruffled hair, flattened at the temples by the damp, her common-looking hands, deformed by work and frost! But what could she do then but try to keep calm? Small of stature, without the least attraction, of physique or personality (if only she’d played the tart a bit more!), she might as well accept her fate now, since it had already been sealed. Who knows? If at that point she’d been able to keep her composure, perhaps David would have been grateful to her. Perhaps in the future he’d have been able to treat her like an old friend to whom every request is conceded, who’d be able to give him any advice, even the most unwelcome. Not much to ask? Little enough. Still, better than nothing.
By then they’d have gone through the gate and reached the entrance.
Though his voice was reduced to a whisper, David kept on talking. What was he saying?
Soon after he graduated—he might, for example, be saying—he would get the hell out, not only of Ferrara, but of Italy. He was fed up with the tedious life of the provinces, of rotting in this hole of a city. Almost certainly he would be off to America, to stay there and settle, definitively.
With whom would he go to America? she had risked asking him on one occasion. Alone, or with that young lady he liked so much?
“Alone,” he’d replied, annoyed.
He wasn’t the type to marry, he’d added. Anyone. As things were now, all he wanted was a change of air, he’d already told her. Nothing more than that.
She had said nothing in reply. She’d merely nodded in the dark.
Another time though—and she would regret it later, in bed, when the ticking of the alarm clock on the bedside table and the wheezing noise her mother made while sleeping had kept her awake—she had burst out laughing.
She had asked him: “And if I got pregnant?”
She was well aware that a question of this kind would succeed in detaining David for another five minutes. What he would say in those five minutes didn’t matter to her. What mattered was that before going he would feel obliged to kiss her.
6.
THE WINTER of 1929 was unusually hard. To find another to compare to it, Oreste Benetti declared, you’d have to go back as far as the famous winter of 1903, when even the river Po was frozen over, or perhaps to the winter of 1917.
It began to snow before Christmas, and it kept snowing until the eve of Epiphany. Yet the cold was still a long way from the extraordinary levels it would reach in the following months. There was even, just after Epiphany, a brief interlude of sun, almost spring-like in its warmth, and the snow had already begun to melt.
“Can it be trusted?” Maria Mantovani wondered.
From the bed, where since around the start of December she had been confined because of a feverish flu, which had left her face lined and her chest racked by an ugly cough, the old woman listened to the splashing and squelching from the occasional vehicle that passed along Via Salinguerra. No, it couldn’t be trusted, she ended by replying to herself, the corners of her mouth turned down in a bitter expression. That spell of warmth, but rather than warmth all that mist which from the early afternoon onward swept in from the surrounding countryside and seemed to drench everything just as if it were rain, didn’t help at all in fostering any illusions.
Then, as soon as he came in (he now came in without ringing the bell, as Lida had given him a key some time ago), Oreste Benetti divested himself of his sodden greatcoat, hung it on a nail sticking out of the entrance door. He came down the stairs, happy as can be. At length, after seating himself, as ever, at the head of the table, he began to talk.
For a couple of months, that is, since Ireneo had started going to the seminary, the main topic of his speeches had been the boy himself. Naturally, he was saying, there was no point in rushing to decide. All the same, in his modest opinion, from now on it was worth considering what job Ireneo would do when he was grown-up. The first three years at junior high school—those in any case he ought to do. But afterward? Take him out of school and put him immediately to work somewhere? No—they agreed that wasn’t an option. And yet once he’d got his certificate from middle school, a choice regarding the various schools (at Ferrara it wasn’t as if there was only the high school, no, there were the Training Colleges, the Technical Institute from which one graduated as an accountant or surveyor, not to mention the Industrial Institute in the Vicolo Mozzo Roversella!), a choice of one kind or another couldn’t be avoided.
One evening, on his arrival, not without solemnity, he announced that that very afternoon he had dropped in at the seminary. He was invited in by Don Bonora, the director, who had taken over some twenty years ago from poor Don Castelli, and he had asked him about Ireneo.
“What can I say?” Don Bonora had at first somewhat guardedly replied. “We are just starting out on logical analysis and grammar. We have yet to begin a real study of Latin . . .”
He had then tried to sound out the director on what he thought of Ireneo’s character. To which, the priest, although continuing to express himself with great prudence and tact, had replied that yes, effectively, the boy’s character gave him some cause for concern. It was too early, you understand, he had added, to formulate any definitive judgement of him . . . but that we were dealing with a slightly weak, distracted character, of this, unfortunately, there seemed to him little doubt.
The bookbinder compressed his lips. Then, all of a sudden, he began to talk of the weather.
“In my opinion, we’re not clear of it,” he declared, raising his eyes to the ceiling and sniffing the air cautiously, “the worst is yet to come.”
And Maria Mantovani, stretched out on her bed at the end of the room (from the table where the bookbinder and Lida usually sat facing each other, one could see nothing but her pallid prominent nose, with the two black vertical holes of her nostrils), immediately nodded in agreement, smiling in silence at some private thought.
Oreste Benetti was right. The worst of the winter was yet to come. At the start of the last third of January, as it happened, the sky once again became overcast, the temperature dropped, and as vicious gusts disturbed the air, it began to snow again with a furious intensity. It was like being high up in the mountains. Reduced to mere pathways, or narrow tracks arduously kept clear by the teams of shovellers the town council had hurriedly employed, the streets, especially the smaller ones, provided thoroughfare only for pedestrians. Since the snow had fallen, and the city walls had become the destination for enthusiastic crowds of impromptu skiers, mainly students, at a certain point it was decided by the Fascist Federation, to promote competitions up there, and especially along that stretch of the walls that runs between Porta San Giorgio and Porta Reno. This meant that Via Salinguerra, usually so deserted and silent, became transformed from one day to the next into a gathering place of much noise and bustle.
Quite suddenly Maria Mantovani’s health worsened. Her fever began to run high; she became breathless. A doctor was called, and after a rapid examination, he announced that she was suffering from pneumonia. Was she in danger? Without doubt she was! the doctor confirmed, in reply to the direct question addressed to him by the little man of advanced years, perhaps a relative, who had called him out. The general condition of the patient which, even at a cursory glance, looked precarious, hardly promised a happy outcome.
Predicted and feared, the crisis came on the fifth day following.
Maria Mantovani didn’t take her eyes off the window. Beyond the glass, which the daylight struggled to filter through, she could make out the snow falling thickly, in scurries. She seemed to be struggling to hear. Via Salinguerra resounded feebly with happy cries and hurrying footsteps. What was going on out there? she wondered. It was as if the city were having a celebration. But how come every voice, every sound, seemed to reach her from so far away?
“I can’t hear clearly,” she complained. “I can’t hear anymore. It’s as if my ears have been stuffed with cotton wool.”
“It’s snowing,” Lida replied softly, sitting at the bedside. “That’s why it all sounds so muffled to you.”
The old woman gave a knowing little laugh.
“It’s not as though it’s because of that,” she murmured, shaking her head and lowering her eyelids.
After a couple of hours her wheezing became a death rattle. A priest ought to be called. And the bookbinder, who had suddenly vanished, in fact quickly returned with the parish priest of Santa Maria in Vado.
In the meantime the room had filled with people.
They were mainly the women of the neighborhood who, although no one had alerted them, spontaneously appeared. How had they got in? Lida found herself wondering. Was it possible that Oreste (Oreste, heavens—she noticed herself calling him simply by his first name, which she had never done before . . .), was it possible that Oreste had forgotten to shut the front door behind him? However it had happened, a half-hour later, when the priest had gone away, the neighbors didn’t leave the room. They all stayed: huddled underneath the window with their shawls over their heads and fervently whispering.
Rigid in the center of the room, Oreste Benetti held his hands together.
As soon as the death rattle ceased he came forward and leaned over the sickbed. Lightly and precisely, his hands moved to close the half-open eyes of Maria Mantovani, to cross her skeletal arms over her chest, and then, with a final, dextrous touch, to smooth the rumpled sheet and reposition the coverlet which had slipped almost entirely on to the floor.
All this time, until the bookbinder, having finished his work, was on the point of leaving soundlessly, Lida hadn’t made a single movement. But even after those big busy hands had withdrawn, hands that belonged to the man who, soon enough, she knew it as a certainty by now, would become her husband, even afterward, she stayed there seated beside the bed, to stare at the waxen profile of her mother. Her almost closed eyelids, her nose that suddenly appeared too big, too prominent, her lips hinting at a vague, absurdly happy smile: the whole, all-too-familiar physiognomy revealed itself as different at a stroke, so much so that it was as if only then was she able to perceive it in all its particularity. As if she could keep on and on staring at her mother’s face. While she did so, she felt something old, something bitter, something hard slowly dissolving within her.
She covered her face with her hands and began to weep silently.
Finally she raised her head, turning her eyes full of tears toward the bookbinder.
“Leave me be,” she said in a low voice. “You too, Oreste,” she added, nodding, “go away as well.”
“Quite, quite, my dear . . .” he stammered, intimidated.
The neighborhood women were already leaving. After he’d tagged along behind their group halfway up the stairs, Oreste was the last to reach the landing and, closing the door, the last to disappear.
With her elbow resting on the sickbed and her cheek on her palm, Lida, left alone, thought about her mother, about herself, about their two lives. But she was mainly thinking of David, and the room in the big apartment block on Via Mortara where, at the beginning of that distant spring, she had gone to live with him.
It had happened like this.
One evening, at the end of winter—that same winter during which, because of the boredom and irritability which showed in David’s every word and gesture, she was expecting any moment for him to say to her, “That’s enough, Lida, from now on it would be better if we stopped seeing each other,” and she was eaten away by this waiting—an evening just like many others, David had suggested to her out of the blue that they “set up house together like any normal working-class couple” in the big apartment block on Via Mortara. He had decided to make a clean break with his family, he had added, in order to “forge a new life for himself.” He was prepared to live in a “garret,” a “fine, poetic garret under the eaves,” with a view not only of the whole city, but also “of the countryside as far as the hills of Bologna.” In order “to support his family” he’d be willing “to work in the sugar factory” . . . And she? What else could she do apart from immediately assenting, as she had on that other occasion, the first, when, meeting him by chance in the open-air locale of Borgo San Giorgio (she being at that time little more than sixteen, in every way a mere girl) they had remained together as a couple for the whole evening, and then, toward midnight, ended up in a field close by the city walls? Yet again, she hadn’t asked herself a thing, hadn’t hesitated for a single moment. A few evenings later, she had left the house with a bundle under her arms which her mother, as usual, hadn’t dared to comment on, though had surely noticed. Just like that: Goodbye! What madness! And yet, only later, much later, after having given birth, when she had returned to stay alone in the room at the big apartment block, and the child wouldn’t stop crying, and she sensed her breasts every day were producing less and less milk, and she had hardly any lire left, only then did she begin to rouse herself from the long waking dream that her life had been until then.
But David, who was he? she now asked herself after many years. What was he looking for, what did he really want?
In the big apartment block, in a room on the floor below, lived the family of a nurse at the Sant’Anna Hospital. They were called Mastellari, and there were six of them: the nurse, his wife and four children.
Mornings when she went down with the pitcher to bring water from the courtyard, it wasn’t unusual for her to bump into Signora Mastellari.
“What does your husband do?” the woman had once asked her. “Does he work in a factory?”
“Yes—but at the moment he’s unemployed. Soon he’ll be working in the sugar factory,” she had replied calmly, utterly sure that David, a student, the son of well-to-do parents, and quite regardless of whether he was late with his graduation and had broken with his family, would never in a million years end up working in that factory.
A factory worker—just imagine it! And yet what was it that David most aspired to be if not a “typical worker.” Wasn’t that what he kept on repeating?
It was enough that he talked, and then everything became simple, easy, attainable. To get married? He had always considered marriage a joke—he would declare once again—one of the most typical and nauseating “bourgeois idiocies.” But seeing that she was at heart drawn to “nuptials,” he would quickly add, smiling, that she shouldn’t fret, at the most within a year, when he’d found work—“a position at the town hall”—he would undoubtedly be able to make a respectable woman of her. It was certain. He would marry her; he had no hesitation in promising her that. Confronted with her “more than legitimate and comprehensible aspiration” to become his wife, his “wife also as regards the law,” not only did he not draw back, but rather he would have done his utmost so that “the time all this would take” should be speeded up . . .
The afternoons, those sweltering summer afternoons, he generally passed stretched out, nearly always asleep. His breathing was so slow, his cheeks so pallid under a few days’ growth of beard, that at times she—seated beside his bed exactly as she now was beside her mother’s bed—couldn’t resist the temptation to take him by the arm and give him a shake. “What is it?” he’d grumble, seemingly unable to lift his eyelids. Then, turning toward the wall—his pyjama top from behind was soaked with sweat—he would fall back into a deep sleep.
Usually, as soon as they’d had their supper, they went out. In search of coolness, they’d adopted the habit of staying out late at Porta Mare. That rather crowded kilometer which separated the big apartment block from Porta Mare was worth putting up with. A little farther on from the Customs barrier, there was an ice-cream kiosk with ten or so small tables in front, and ice cream, as David knew, she’d always loved since she was a baby.
Taking Via Fossato di Mortara, you came to the city walls in a few moments. And it had been up there, on one of those evenings, that she had suddenly stopped walking.
“Listen. I think I’m going to have a child,” she said very calmly, putting her hand on David’s arm.
At that moment, he didn’t seem surprised. Not a gesture from him, not a word.
A little later, though, after they’d reached the usual kiosk, and she stood there with her chest leaning on the edge of the zinc counter and her eyes dazzled by the light of the acetylene lamp, he gently asked her:
“And what would you like? Lemon or chocolate?”
Without showing any desire to sit down, he had already begun to lick his ice cream (as ever a custard-and-vanilla combination). But he seemed sad, disappointed. While he licked his ice cream, he looked at her; he examined her from head to toe.
“The heat’s unbearable this evening,” he’d exclaimed at a certain point, with a bitter sigh. “To think that, up in the mountains as soon as it gets dark, you have to put on a pullover.”
He was evidently referring to his family, who from the first of June had been holidaying up in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
“Where have they gone to stay, your family?” she’d found the strength to ask (as she too began licking her ice cream, having once again chosen a chocolate one). “Have they rented a house?”
“No. They’ve gone to the Miramonti. Imagine a kind of castle—” he seemed eager to explain—“with a wood all round it, six or seven times the size of the Finzi-Contini garden, that one down there at Piopponi, you know, by the Mura degli Angeli, and at least a dozen times bigger than Montagnone† . . .”
Who was David? What was he looking for? What did he want? And why?
To these questions there was no reply, and there never would be. Besides, it was late. Someone, most likely Oreste, was knocking on the window. She needed to get up, force herself up to the street door and tell him he could come back inside.
7.
IT WAS indeed Oreste.
After having caught up with the neighbors down at the entrance, for a good half-hour Oreste had stayed to talk to the women of what had happened and chiefly to listen to them. But then the cluster had moved on into the street and dispersed, and he, left alone, had begun to walk up and down in front of the doorway.
He felt two opposite emotions colliding within him, two conflicting necessities.
On the one hand, he felt the pressing need to rush off and lock up his workshop, so as to be able to confront with the required diligence all that the death of Maria Mantovani saddled him with. And yet the thought of Lida held him back. Several times, bending down and bringing his face close to the steamed-up windowpane, he had tried to peer into the room. Down there, next to the bed, on the right-hand side, he made out a small, curved, motionless, grey figure.
“What’s she up to?” he grumbled after a while, with the affectionate impatience of someone who already considered himself a husband.
The first shadows of evening were falling. It had stopped snowing, but it was still bitterly cold. Through the windows of houses round about could be glimpsed the insides of kitchens, cramped, illuminated dining rooms. He should get a move on and bring things to a head. At last, having yet again bent down to peer into the window (too dark—he concluded: by now he could make out nothing at all), he decided to tap on the window. He stood there, listening, his heart beating dully in his chest, until he seemed to hear Lida’s footsteps ascending the staircase inside. In response he was quick to slip through the entrance. A second before she lowered the handle and opened the door, he was already on the landing.
Straight away, at first glance, he was aware that he once again had the upper hand. Her back leaning against the doorframe, and her eyes seeming to surrender themselves to his own, Lida stared at him in silence. That he should protect her: in her whole demeanor there was no other request.
“Good Lord, you really oughtn’t to spend the night like this!” he said with lowered voice, in dialect, almost roughly.
Then, still whispering, without crossing the threshold, he began to explain to her what he meant to do.
He had to rush off and close the workshop, and since after that he also had to sort out another small matter, he wouldn’t be able to get back for at least a couple of hours. Before going to the workshop, though, he would stop for a minute at the house of one of the neighbors, Signora Bedini. As she had offered to give a hand, he’d ask her to come round.
“Why?” he exclaimed, forestalling a possible objection on Lida’s part. “Goodness me, to keep you company . . . to make you a bit of supper . . . Or even just to pray with you!”
At the word “supper” Lida had shaken her head as a sign of refusal. But the argument that had followed was stronger than her resistance. She lowered her eyes, and he looked at her with a smile.
“So that’s agreed then,” he warned, “don’t put the door chain on. Better still, leave the door ajar. You understand?”
And squeezing her hand, he disappeared up the stairs.
The temperature fell sharply during the night. The thin pinkish light which the following morning tried to pierce through the ice-encrusted windows—Lida was stretched out on her bed, Signora Bedini was curled in an armchair while Oreste, who had spent long stretches of the night in prayer, was on his feet at the window scrutinizing the weather—the light seemed to have arrived from a far-away sun, lost in the vague and misty blue of the sky, a sun that gave no warmth.
Just at that moment—Oreste calculated, with his coat collar raised over the stubbly thick silver hairs on the back of his neck while he blew on his frozen fingers—just at that moment the thermometer must be showing way below zero: ten, fifteen, twenty, who could say? That, however, should have made the weather more stable. During January, and perhaps up till mid February, the cold might drop to an even lower level: so that when the canals in the countryside, the river Reno and even the Po, had frozen over, the pipes of drinking water burst, and so on, in the end the winter would be comparable only with that of 1903. Would the farm produce suffer? Perhaps not. He at any rate felt rather sanguine (and felt not the least bit of embarrassment in admitting it), glad to have figured everything out exactly.
Maria Mantovani’s funeral took place late afternoon that same day.
The third-class carriage advanced, unhindered, over the flattened snow, and behind, apart from the priest and a small cleric, Oreste walked alone. Submitting to his advice, Lida had remained at home. As for him, the old schoolboy of the seminary, the favorite of Don Castelli, the veteran of the Carso front, all the extremes of the weather imbued him with energy, restored to him as if by magic the missed hours of sleep from the night before. He walked with lowered gaze. With a pace that he instinctively accorded with that of the priest, he unceasingly studied the grooves cut into the snow by the carriage’s tall thin wheels, the little slippages of snow that, detaching themselves from the wheel rims, barely powdered the shiny black varnish of the spokes and the leaf springs.
When he got back it was already night. And from the street, rather than knocking on the windowpanes as he had in the past few days, he wanted to announce himself with the emphatic ring of the bell that was his trademark.
Lida was awaiting him at the bottom of the stairs. She must have been asleep. And yet her face, before marked with the signs of weariness, now seemed refreshed and rested. She was completely transformed.
He sat down in his accustomed seat, leaning his folded arms on the table, and looking over at Lida, who was keeping herself busy about the cheap stove. He didn’t miss a single gesture. He observed her with a most particular expression, a mixture of joy and gratitude, which surfaced in his eyes every time he thought he could discern in any phrase or gesture or even in a simple look of hers the attempt or desire to please him.
“Tonight it would best to call on Signora Bedini again,” he said after a while. “I’ll stop by at hers later. Tomorrow I’m thinking of paying a visit to Don Bonora. I think that for the next couple of weeks the boy should sleep round at his house. And then we shall see.”
Already it was he who decided, who chose what would happen in the future.
After supper, they remained seated at a remove from the table that still had to be cleared, to discuss things. Limiting himself to Maria Mantovani and her life, Oreste spoke at length and with much tenderness. He remarked that she had suffered a great deal in her lifetime, poor thing, because she had loved very much, because she had had too much heart. He then described the plot in the Municipal Cemetery where tomorrow morning she would be laid to rest.
It was a really lovely place, he assured her, very respectable. Had she not seen it yet, the recently constructed arcade added to the right side of the San Cristoforo Church, making a great symmetrical curve identical to the arcade next to Via Borso, which had been built also to complete the colonnade in front of Certosa, on the Mura degli Angeli side? Well, her mother would be buried there, under those new arches. No, no—he confirmed—at midday, with the sun that would shine there from dawn to dusk, as in a greenhouse, the spot was really splendid.
“It’s true that those places there, on that side,” he added after a pause, and tightening his lips, “will cost a tidy packet.”
But immediately, fearing that he might have been misunderstood, he explained that God forbid, she, Lida, shouldn’t worry in any way about the expense.
“After working for so many years,” he exclaimed, “thank heavens I’ve been able to save up a little something!”
And since she, he continued, without quite being able to suppress a slight trembling of his lips, had let him hope, had made him believe . . . and considering besides that this would without doubt have pleased her poor mother . . .
“In short, what is mine from now on will count as yours,” he concluded, lowering his voice.
He leaned a little forward, staring her in the eyes—and it was the first time that he had addressed her with the informal “tu”! At last, he stood up, and hurriedly excusing himself, promised to be back in the morning.
They had such a lot to talk about!
8.
“WE HAVE such a lot to talk about”—Oreste would declare at every leave-taking, or at least his serious tender expression would affirm it.
But the one talking, if the truth be told, was always him.
When he didn’t let himself be carried away on the wave of his habitual memories regarding both the years he spent as a boy in the seminary and the war he had later fought in the trenches of the Carso, he embarked on long monologues centered on his religious preferences, and most of all on the recent, decisive political developments, which had such a close bearing on religion.
After the signing of the Lateran Pact, in the February of that year, his patriotism had begun to overflow, liberally, enthusiastically. Good for the Church!—he said—which for the sake of Italy and the world had been able to set aside every trivial doctrinal matter and any sense of rivalry. But good for the Italian State as well, which deserved the highest praise for being the first to set out on the path of reconciliation. And it was clear, while he expressed himself in this manner, that the Church and the State stood before him in the form of a man and a woman, who, leaving behind a prolonged and difficult relationship, often perturbed by violent crises, had finally decided to get married.
And from that point on, how many splendid things would come to pass!—he would pursue the topic with an exultant expression. The spring that was already coming would see the onset of an era of peace and perpetual joy, a return of the legendary golden age. According to the Bible and the evangelist, according to the dream and prophesy of Dante, Church and State would acknowledge each other in perfect accord. The priest would no longer be persecuted nor held in suspicion. Civil society would no longer rebuff him, but welcome him like a father who should be heeded and revered. And if, today, as things stood, the rebirth of an actual and proper Catholic party, one such as the Partito Popolare, would be a perilous thing to hope for, it didn’t matter: for now the results already achieved were more than enough. It was no little thing, if the truth be told, that the Catholic Action Party and those young fellows of the Federazione Università Cattolica Italiana were to be left in peace! It wasn’t a small thing at all, but rather a momentous one, to find oneself able serenely to bless the Fatherland’s flag displaying so much of the Savoyan coat-of-arms!
Carried along by the intense emotion these speeches awoke in him, but changing the tone, he would at last begin to talk of the two of them, of him and Lida, and in particular of the small villa outside Porta San Benedetto where in May, the day after their wedding, they would take up residence.
He would complain. He would take issue with the plasterer because a wall freshly skimmed, and seeping moisture, was showing stains in various places; with the carpenter because a shutter didn’t close properly; with the surveyor because of his brusqueness and bad manners. But then, as soon as he began to describe the place where the villa was being constructed, how his face would relax and become clear again! The little dwelling was situated at the end of Corso San Benedetto—he repeated for the umpteenth time, and it seemed as though he was girding himself to describe certain very special details, almost arcane ones, of a far-away city, a city infinitely more lovely, agreeable and hospitable than Ferrara. He was referring to that district beyond the walls, situated between the Customs barrier and the railway bridge, where a series of houses large and small had been built in the preceding years. Whether larger or smaller, each had at its disposal its own land, to cultivate as a garden or kitchen garden. The two of them, installed there, would be able to breathe clean air—ah! country air. And here, as though overcome, he would then fall quiet—now that the happiness which they had long been awaiting was already in sight, within his grasp, he evidently preferred not to describe it.
May arrived.
In the last few days Oreste had lost his calm. He seemed suddenly riddled with fear, anxiety. He had always referred indirectly to their marriage: by sign, by indirect allusion, nothing more. Now, however, after having been contented for years by a promise that had not even been made in so many words, after having consented to any prevarication, he wanted to expedite everything, not to lose a single day. The date of the ceremony had been decided some time back: they were to be married the third week of the month. And yet, why not get married earlier?—he found himself suggesting. What else did they have to do in preparation?
Lida stared at him, astonished. She didn’t understand.
“Why all this fret just now?” she asked him. “Why had he changed so much?”
He paused a little before replying. He stared at her with desperation in his eyes, then said slowly: “I’m like one of those horses that collapse at the finish line.”
He then spoke of marriage, of what marriage meant to him. He said that he considered it the supreme aim of his life, so that only after they were married—not before!—he might perhaps have the courage to ask for Divine Providence to protect them. It was true, he admitted, nodding gravely. Up till now, he had had no rush. But, on the other hand, how could he have pushed things forward, feeling as he did that he couldn’t count on his own strength?
Lida heard him out. She still didn’t understand. Yet it was enough for her to raise her eyes once more, and she suddenly realized: Oreste was still afraid of losing her! Stretching across the table, she placed her hand on his hands, more tightly clenched than ever in their characteristic convulsion. And a moment later, for the first time, she found herself in his arms.
The years that followed, arduous, calm, largely happy, were marked by no momentous events. Even the winters, Oreste would say—though he was to die quite soon, in the spring of 1938—even the winters seemed to have finally become more settled.
It’s true that every year, toward the end of autumn, he still loved to stand before the window, with the air of a meteorologist. But, of this one could be sure, he did this not because of any doubts about the truth of his predictions, of the now stable, or almost stable good weather, but rather the better to savor the intimate pleasure procured for him by the ownership of a new, modern house equipped with everything necessary for a comfortable life of modest luxury, including an excellent central heating boiler.
It was evident that the future no longer worried him in any way. After the marriage, Lida had immediately adapted herself to his devout habits, and began regularly to frequent the not-far-off church of San Benedetto, just within the city walls. The thin girl eaten away by anxiety, of those years when he had begun to visit a certain room in Via Salinguerra, had now become a beautiful wife, calm, serene, more than a bit chubby. What else could he desire from then on? What could be better?
Sometimes they joked together about this topic of Lida’s beauty.
More inclined to believe it than she tried to appear, she would pull a face.
“Me, beautiful?”
“To say the least!” he would reply, smiling, while, with an expression of pride, he gazed into her eyes.
And yet—he would continue, serious once more—there was absolutely no reason to be surprised by that. This new beauty of hers, so right and timely, so much that of a wife, for which in the end it didn’t seem presumptuous on his part to assign himself some portion of the credit, arrived on cue to demonstrate, had there been any such need, that the Good Lord had not only approved their union, but had taken pleasure in it.
9.
“HE WAS happy,” Lida sometimes told herself.
And yet, as soon as she happened to frame these words in her mind, an echo would break in on her to deform and distort them. Flecked with doubt, with painful rancor, the words would change into a question to which no one, herself least of all, would be able to reply other than in the negative.
Poor Oreste. He, too, had not been happy. No. In truth something had always been missing for him as well. Sufficient proof was the tender, more than paternal care that for years, for all the years of their marriage, he had lavished upon Ireneo.
When Ireneo had left the seminary with the intermediate diploma in his pocket, Oreste had immediately taken him on, in the workshop, and had installed him at his own little bench between the trimming machines and the glass door. He had wanted to teach him the trade. And some late afternoons, at dusk, when Lida would cross half of the city to reach the binding shop in Via Salinguerra—later, all three of them would return up the Corso Giovecca or Via Mazzini, but each time passing by in front of the Caffè della Borsa, right in the center—it seemed to her as though she could still see him as he brooded behind the big bench with his eyes shining with affectionate zeal over that apprentice, who was so sad, so mute, and yet so ready to be distracted by the least thing happening in the square outside. It seemed to her that she could still see him, still hear him: with that vigorous torso of his, out of keeping with his short legs, that loomed up from the stool on the other side of the bench, with his big, hard hands, oddly become more delicate since his marriage vows (he could never be parted from his wedding ring—not even in 1935 at the time of the sanctions!‡ ), with his strong, chirpy, piercing voice . . . Oh, how hard he must have struggled so that she, Lida, remained unaware of his desire for a son! How he must have secretly tormented himself, almost as though to punish the desire itself, to smother it within him: at a certain point he had even pressed for Ireneo to assume his surname!
And yet, despite everything, Lida thought, Oreste never gave up hope. For her to be sure of this she only needed to remember the look he gave her every time she entered the workshop: a questioning but calm look, full of unbending faith.
If not now, his look said, then soon, very soon, she would come to him with the great news. She would give him a son, without doubt, a son that was really his, of his blood, and thus different physically and in character from the son she had before marrying him, who, although he had given him his own surname, although he was instructing him in his own trade with all the enthusiasm he was capable of, had nevertheless never wanted to call him anything but uncle: “Uncle Oreste.”
A son that was really his—Lida pursued the thought—that was what was missing for him, that was the only shadow that had disturbed the serenity of their married life.
Regarding that golden age of which, in February 1929, he had predicted the return, he evidently awaited nothing so eagerly as to hear her declare: “I’m pregnant.”
It was equally evident, though, that death, taking him by surprise, had prevented the possibility of this hope turning into despair.
* The Carso was part of the Italian Front in the First World War, on mountainous terrain in what is now Slovenia; the terrible conditions were equivalent to the hardships of the trenches on the Western Front.
† A hill in southeast Ferrara made from the rubble left over from the construction of the city walls that became a public garden.
‡ In October 1935, in response to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, the League of Nations began to impose limited sanctions on Italy.