1.
EVEN today, rummaging through some small second-hand stores in Ferrara, it’s not unlikely that you could turn up postcards almost a hundred years old. They show views that are yellowed, stained, sometimes, to tell the truth, barely decipherable . . . One of the many shows Corso Giovecca, the main city thoroughfare, as it was then, in the second half of the nineteenth century. To the right and in shadow, in the wings, looms the buttress of the City Theater, while the light, typical of a golden springtime dusk of the Emilia Romagna, congregates entirely on the left-hand side of the image. There the houses are low, having for the most part only a single floor, with their roofs covered with thick russet tiles, and below them some little shops, a grocer’s store, the entrance to a coal merchant’s, a horsemeat butcher and so on: all of which were razed to the ground when, in 1930, the eighth year of the Fascist Era, almost opposite the City Theater, the decision was made to build the enormous structure of the General Insurance in white Roman travertine.
The postcard has been adapted from a photograph. As such it reveals, and not inaccurately, the look of the Corso Giovecca around the turn of the twentieth century—a kind of wide carriageway amid the rather shapeless surroundings, with its rough cobbles, more fitting for a large village of Lower Romagna than of a provincial capital, divided in the middle by the fine parallel lines of the tram rails—but it also reveals just as clearly how life was going on along the entire street in that moment when the photographer pressed the button. The street thus captured extends from the corner of the City Theater and the Gran Cafe Zampori beneath it, to the right, a few yards away from where the tripod had been set up, as far down there as the distant, pink sunlit facade of the Prospettiva Arch at the very end.
In the foreground the image seems crammed with detail. One can see the boy from the barber shop peeping from the threshold and picking his teeth; a dog sniffing the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the horsemeat butcher’s; a schoolboy running across the street from left to right, just managing to avoid ending up under the wheels of a calèche; a middle-aged gentleman, in frockcoat and bowler hat, who, with lifted arm, pulls back the curtain which shields the interior of the Cafe Zampori from any excessive intrusion of light; a splendid coach and four which is moving forward at a fast trot to attack the so-called Castle ascent. Except that as soon as one begins to search, perhaps half-closing one’s eyes, the slender central space of the postcard which corresponds to the furthest part of the Corso Giovecca, everything then becomes confused, things and people merge together in a kind of luminous dusty haze, all of which would help explain why a girl of around twenty years of age, at that very moment walking quickly along the left-hand sidewalk, having arrived at not more than a hundred meters from the Prospettiva Arch, would have been unable to transmit as far as to us contemporary spectators the least visible sign of her existence.
We should declare right away that the girl was no beauty. Her face was more or less that of many others, neither beautiful nor ugly: rendered, if that’s possible, even more average and insignificant by the fact that in those days the use of lipstick, rouge and powder was not generally acceptable among the working classes. Dark-brown eyes in which the beams of youth only rarely shone, and then almost stealthily, with a frightened, melancholic expression, not that different from the sweet, patient look in the gaze of some domestic animals; chestnut-brown hair that, drawn back at the nape, laid bare rather too much of the bulging, bulky, peasant forehead; a squat, busty torso, belted by a black velvet ribbon, that ended in a slender, not to say graceful neck . . . in a fashionable street such as Corso Giovecca, and during, moreover, that especially animated and bustling hour which, in Ferrara, no less today than at that time, has always preceded the intimate evening ritual of supper, it’s fair to suppose that even to a less indifferent eye than the photographic lens, the passing by of a girl like this might easily be overlooked.
It now remains to establish what thoughts, on a May evening some seventy years ago, might have been entertained by a girl like this, a trainee nurse of less than three months standing at the City Hospital of Ferrara.
Yet turning back to examine in that same postcard, this time with a slightly warmer sense of real involvement, the general look of Corso Giovecca at that moment of the day and of its history, paying attention to the combined effect of joy, of hopefulness, produced in the very foreground by that blackish spur of the City Theater, so like a dauntless prow that advances toward freedom and the future, it’s hard to dispose of the impression that some tinge of the naive fantasy of a girl—of that and no other girl—heading home after many hours of no doubt uncongenial work, will somehow be ingrained within the image we have before us.
At the end of a whole day spent in the sad wards of the former convent, where, soon after 1860, the Sant’Anna Hospital had found temporary and inadequate lodging, it was, one could deduce, with real eagerness that Gemma Brondi abandoned herself to her adolescent dreams and imaginings. She would be walking, one might say, without seeing. So much so that, approaching the Prospettiva, when, as was her habit each evening, she mechanically raised her eyes to the three arches of the architectural obstruction, a phrase that was whispered in her ear at that exact moment (“Good evening, Signorina” or something of the kind) found her unready and defenceless, only able to blush and then go pale, and to look around timidly in search of escape.
“Good evening, Signorina,” the voice had whispered. “Allow me to accompany you.”
The phrase had been this or, as already said, something very similar. Speaking thus, and engaging Gemma Brondi in a conversation that forced her to avoid the black and penetrating eyes of her interlocutor, was a sturdy young man of around thirty years of age, dressed in dark clothes, gripping the handlebars of a heavy Triumph bicycle: a young man with a thin face on which gleamed silver-rimmed spectacles, and a moustache, no less black than his eyes, that drooped around his mouth.
But at this point, traveling at speed along the track which these two young people are about to walk, let us betake ourselves a little way from the Prospettiva on Corso Giovecca, and more particularly inside the big, rustic dwelling where the Brondis, a country family, have lived within the city since time immemorial. The house rises in the shelter of the city walls, separated from them only by virtue of the little dusty street that runs along that stretch of the walls. It is already almost night. In the ground-floor rooms, whose windows look back toward the open space of the vegetable gardens, they have just now turned on the lights.
2.
THE ONLY person in the house who had taken any notice right from the start of Dr. Corcos, Dr. Elia Corcos, was Ausilia, the elder sister.
Every evening, there she was again.
After having laid the little dining room’s round table, and then, after going into the kitchen and lighting the stove under the pot and the frying pan, as soon as the voices of her father and brothers, who were still working in the vegetable garden in the dark and were now about to come in, began to be more distinctly audible, just at that moment Ausilia vanished, only to reappear later, when the others were about to finish their meal.
Where exactly Ausilia had gone to hide, her mother had almost immediately figured out. But why should she feel any need to speak of it? Seated, in the manner of an arzdóra,* with the kitchen door at her back, she only allowed herself an inner smile at the image of her eldest daughter leaning on her elbows at the window of the room she shared with her sister, with Gemma, and perhaps unburdening herself of a loud sigh. As regards old Brondi and his three sons, they, bent over their plates, kept on eating with their customary appetite. The novelty of these regular, recurrent disappearances of Ausilia at suppertime seemed not to hold any interest for them. Why should we bother about that?—their aspect seemed to be saying. After a short while, Ausilia, like the capricious spinster she was well on her way to becoming, would reappear of her own accord, whenever it suited her.
Having come down the internal stairs without making the least sound, Ausilia at last presented herself at the doorway of the dining room, light-footed as a ghost. Her mother was the only one to raise her head. Was this whole affair dragging on? she was silently asking, with the rapid look she threw toward the shadows, where, waiting to approach and be seated, Ausilia usually hovered for a moment. Nor was Ausilia’s response ever slow in coming. In acute expectation of the subsequent entry of Gemma, always a bit ruffled and out of breath, Dolores Brondi would receive the information that she sought and that had been weighing on her. No doubt about that, Ausilia would assure her, by her imperceptible shrug of assent. The affair was certainly dragging on, and was showing no signs at all of ending.
Some words passed between mother and daughter about a month later while, as the sun had nearly set, they went to Vespers as usual at the nearby church of Sant’Andrea.
To reach Via Campo Sabbionario where the church was more quickly, they tended to take the path behind the house that led straight across the garden till it reached a small green gate down at the end, situated exactly halfway along the surrounding wall. Who knows? Perhaps it was the narrowness of the path that encouraged them to share these initial confidences, the first exchange of observations and opinions . . . The fact is that, only after the broken, almost fearful sorties of an opening dialogue between the two women, conducted almost at a running pace, without the confidence even to look each other in the face, concerning the looks of Gemma’s “crush”—who, judging by the very pale face and the black moustache that drooped around a carefully shaven chin, could only be a gentleman—only after that was Ausilia allowed to go home, a good twenty minutes before the service’s concluding “Amen.” Her eyes fixed on the altar, Dolores Brondi sensed her getting up, barely displacing the straw seat at her side. True enough—she reckoned, when left alone and gnawed at by a secret envy—it was unlikely the two of them would be able to discuss their new discoveries with the required leisure before the following evening. Soon, anyway, when the thought of Ausilia stationed at her window-observatory had induced her to prolong her conversation with some women of the neighborhood at the small gate to the vegetable garden a moment or two longer than necessary, if a male voice behind her had shouted from afar, “And so, are we going to eat?” (till then that had never happened, but it might!), she would have turned back to the house without any hurry, displaying the cold, hostile expression of someone prepared to assert their rights whatever it cost. Make no mistake about that. She and Ausilia never went out. Never went out, except at the end of the day, and only so as to finish it in a sanctified manner. Who could complain about that? They’d better come armed! If that had happened, supper would have been eaten accompanied by the silence of the tomb. And then, once Gemma had also come back in and she too had finished eating, everyone to bed.
Summer was approaching. Around the brown, back-lit mass of the apse of Sant’Andrea the bats wheeled, with ever more piercing squeaks. And gradually, as time passed, the image of Gemma’s suitor was embellished with fresh details: a splendid, swallowtail blue jacket, gleaming silver spectacles, a fat gold watch which he once, at the point of leaving, drew from his waistcoat pocket, and then, as later additions, a white silk cravat, an ivory-handled cane and a manner, what a manner . . . One evening, and this caused Ausilia to draw back in surprise, the couple, rather than appearing down in the street, had appeared above, among the trees on the city walls almost at the height of the window: it might prompt the suspicion that Gemma and the man had been stretched out till then in the thick grass of a meadow to hold and kiss each other—or even worse! Another evening, again on the verge of saying goodbye and leaving, he, besides lifting his cap, had bowed down ceremoniously, perhaps he’d even kissed her hand. His intentions were only too clear! Ausilia, at once awestruck and scandalized, concluded her account of these recent events. Was it possible, though, that Gemma was unaware of the risk she was running? Was it possible she didn’t understand that a gentleman like that . . .? But then who was this gentleman, what was he called?
Of the thirty-year-old Dr. Elia Corcos there is no extant portrait. The only one, conserved by Signora Gemma Corcos, during her lifetime, in a small chest of drawers which many years after her death was sold along with other of her belongings to an antiques dealer in Via Mazzini, would be traceable by cutting out a small head from a group photograph, which she, still a girl, a tiny out-of-focus oval among the many, had taken home from the hospital and then hidden in her lingerie drawer. So, just supposing for the sake of pure conjecture that while exploring the insides of a dusty, worm-eaten piece of furniture extracted from the depths of some storeroom it were possible to recover this photograph (a typical keepsake: with ten or so doctors in white coats seated in a semicircle at the front, and behind, standing, to make a background and as it were a crown, some thirty nurses in grey uniforms), it wouldn’t be at all unlikely that, carefully observing the gaunt, hungry and very pale face of Elia Corcos at thirty, one might manage to figure out precisely enough the amazement of Ausilia Brondi to begin with, and very soon after of her mother, when their wide-eyed gaze finally fell on the reality so very different from the one which, little by little, they had built up in their fertile imaginings. “Huh, just one of those little half-starved doctors from the hospital!” they exclaimed together, galled and disappointed. A nothing, a nobody. Seeing as Gemma hadn’t done so, it should be their job to inform the family. Would her father and brothers any longer, from then on, allow Gemma to leave the house? Never mind! So that an affair of this kind be brought to a stop, all of them would gladly have renounced the few coppers she brought home from the Sant’Anna.
Between saying and doing, between the intention and the action, however, there remained the usual shortfall. The truth was that as soon as she returned home (each time, walking along the vegetable garden’s narrow path, between the small green gate and the flower bed, had a calming effect on her), Ausilia hurried as usual up to her bedroom and, having replaced the photograph in Gemma’s drawer, took up her customary stance at the window.
The thrill of spying and reporting, of conjectures and deductions, the secret delights of fantasy, undermining the severe, intransigent resolution just now formulated, had always deferred it to an undefined future, but as it happened just at the end of that same day all these intentions and prevarications were brought to a sudden halt before the weight of facts.
The enamoured couple were proceeding along the little road without showing any awareness of having arrived at the place where, after glancing up at the blinds from behind which Ausilia was observing them, they would promptly go their separate ways. Gemma was at a slight remove from the doctor, who, though walking at the same pace as her, was separated from her by the bicycle. They were not speaking. But there was something in the stiffness of their carriage, the stubborn way they both kept their gaze fixed on the ground, which conferred a weight and a particular solemnity on their silence. In addition, now they had advanced a bit farther, it seemed to Ausilia that her sister’s cheeks were streaked with tears.
By this stage they were beneath the window, in front of the doorway. Ausilia suddenly felt herself short of breath. “What now?” she whispered, pressing a hand to her breast. What did their sudden gaze into each other’s eyes mean? And why did they remain separated by the bicycle without saying a word?
Then, as if in response, the doctor picked up the Triumph by the saddle and handlebars, turned it round and quickly leaned it against the grassy slope of the city wall on the other side of the road. He stood for a moment there before it, with his back turned and bent over, giving the impression that he was in rapt examination of its chain, or perhaps a pedal. At last, straightening up, he slowly retraced his steps.
Gemma had not moved. With her back to the doorframe, she waited.
The other made a strange gesture: just as though—Ausilia thought—he was combing his moustache.
They kissed for a long time. Again and again.
After which, the doctor once more crossed the road and, having collected the bicycle, wheeled it behind him—time had passed: even in the darkness at the start of the scene it was hard to discern his movements—then he followed Gemma, who had already entered, inside the house.
3.
BROUGHT INTO the small dining room and given a seat just in front of the head of the family, who, at his entrance, had raised his eyes from a game of patience and had kept gazing at him with half-open mouth, the doctor began by introducing himself. His name, surname, his parents, his profession, even his address . . . it was a catalogue of personal data of the most official kind: a long stream which, perhaps, had it not been accompanied by the extraordinary, somehow paralyzing courtesy of his manner, or even without the tension which had suddenly gripped the room, might have appeared irksome, pedantic and in its specificity at the very least gratuitous and extravagant.
Elia Corcos—the four males of the house, who until that moment had no clue even about his existence, were in the meantime thinking—what the hell kind of a name is that? His doctor’s frockcoat; the white silk tie; the black cap with large raised rim which, placed on his tightly pressed knees, stood just proud of the table edge (and everything a bit worn, a touch faded, as though it had been bought secondhand); his eloquence peppered every now and then with brief phrases or single words in dialect, which he pronounced almost shyly, as though he were picking them up with tweezers; his face itself, which seemed fashioned out of a special substance, finer and more fragile than the usual material: however modest his family origins may have been, even if now he was living alone as a bachelor, or whatever his present financial circumstances, everything about him, they were only too aware, spoke of his belonging to a different class, the class of gentlemen, and therefore different, fundamentally alien.
Compared to this fact, every other consideration, including that he wasn’t a Catholic but Jewish, or rather an “Israelite” as he himself termed it, occupied for the moment a very subsidiary position. Apart from the usual, everlasting sense of inferiority, of respect above all created by a timidity as regards speech which always afflicted the country folk, irrespective of whether or not they lived within the city walls, in whatever relations they had with the middle classes, his presence to begin with provoked no special response at all. But what response could it have been expected to provoke at that particular time? The sun of renown, or rather that of an unwearying, affectionate admiration, quite close to fetishistic idolization, which for three entire generations of Ferraresi from all social classes would accompany Elia Corcos throughout his long life—so much so as to make of him a kind of institution, a municipal symbol—the dawning of that sun, which coincided with the dawn of a new century, was still too distant to be observed in the vast sky above the city.
“A great doctor!” would be another accolade, but only to be heard some ten years later, and not before.
Or even some decades later, from witnesses to the flourishing old age of Elia Corcos:
“A genius, gentlemen! A man who if Ferrara had not at that time been Ferrara, but Bologna . . .”
According to the latter, those forever unsatisfied characters, lamenting among other things, the modern decline of Ferrara, always praising and bewailing the distant Renaissance splendors of the house of d’Este, the determining cause of the inadequate (because merely provincial) fortune of Corcos’ medical career was a specific historical event that occurred toward the end of the last century.
Around 1890, an obscure Bologna deputy, a Socialist, by “nefariously” blackmailing Crispi, the great Francesco Crispi, had contrived that the most important northern railway terminus was sited not at Ferrara, but at Bologna. All Bologna’s prosperity, all its successive and persisting wealth hinged on that fatal decision, yet the more odious because it had been achieved by the swindle of a Socialist, but for that no whit less advantageous and effective for Bologna, which, thanks to this, became in a trice the major city of Emilia Romagna. So then, like so many of his fellow citizens, like so many equally distinguished gentlemen, guilty of nothing but having been born and brought up in Ferrara, Elia Corcos had only been an innocent victim of political shenanigans. He, too, along with innumerable of his fellow citizens worthy of a better fate, just when he was ready to take flight—Power, Glory, Happiness, and so on: oh, the great eternal words, held back in the throat by fierce pride, but still valid in the imagination, to light up prodigious skies behind the four towers of the Castle that rise in the city center and give the city’s first greeting to whoever enters from the countryside, gloriously bright . . . he too, just when everything was at its most promising, had had to renounce, withdraw, surrender. Around the same time he had taken a wife. And his marriage, at the age of thirty, to a working-class girl, undoubtedly gifted with many excellent qualities, though who knows if she even completed the fourth form at middle school, had sealed his defeat and self-sacrifice.
This, then, many decades later, would have been the train of thought of many Ferraresi whose temples had begun to grey between the two wars of this century regarding Elia Corcos and the strange, not to say baffling, marriage of his youth. Having ranged so widely, even evoking the name of Francesco Crispi, these thoughts always led to the same conclusion: that Signora Gemma, the deceased wife of Elia Corcos, had not understood, that Gemma Corcos, née Brondi, had not, poor thing, really been the right choice. But was it fair, or useful, to hold her to account in such an unfeeling manner? For a good while she lived alone at the end of Via Borso, at the Charterhouse. And yet had she not been the only person in Ferrara who had ever penetrated the barrier of the solemn, ironical hat raisings which Elia Corcos, especially in the spring, before dinner, strolling along the Corso Giovecca, would habitually dispense to right and left: a barrier of courtesy which had quickly and inevitably blocked any reflex of curiosity, any tentative investigation. And leaving aside once and for all Ferrara and its progressive decline after the Unification, that very evening of 1888—that far-off summer evening—in the course of which Elia Corcos had asked for her hand and been accepted as her fiancé, who, if not her, was seated in that small, dark, rustic dining room of the Brondi house between him, Corcos, and her father, at an equal distance from both of them? That place which she occupied was the perfect one to catch the very instant in which, leaning suddenly out of the shadow, the face of the guest had entered, drained, into the circle of light.
Everywhere around was shadow. In the center the tablecloth shone immaculately.
No, no one was better placed than Gemma Corcos, née Brondi, to appreciate the time required for that sacrifice to be made. The time required by Elia to state the actual reason for his presence—Gemma would recall this to the end of her days—was no more than would be needed to accomplish a brief series of movements: to bend his back, lean his head forward, offer to the light his pale face, a lot paler even than it usually was, as though all the blood in his veins and arteries had suddenly been sucked back into his heart.
What that face declared—the words that tumbled from his mouth didn’t count, didn’t have the least importance—was: “Why am I here to ask, as just a moment ago I did ask, that old drunkard for the hand of his daughter the nurse? For what possible motive, in God’s name, am I ruining my life by my own hand? Just to make up for a pregnancy? And, to boot, not even one that’s ‘confirmed?’”
And then: “I still have a choice, should I want it. Changing my mind, I could still leave this place, defy the whole lot of them—father, mother, brother—and never be seen again. As I could, also, should I choose to, play along, from henceforth accept the modest life of a provincial general practitioner, and yet, with the advantage in this case, that when the girl soon accompanies me to the door on to the street, I could start insinuating that she was responsible for everything, that it was they who in a certain sense forced me into this marriage.”
And then again: “At this crossroads, the one road rough, hard and uncertain, the other smooth, easy, nice and comfortable, one can’t, in all justice, really waver about which to take!”
And finally, while beneath his moustache his lips made a series of lateral tics, clearly sardonic: “Would you really call it smooth, that road I’m heading down? Nice and comfortable, seriously? Just try it yourself!”
4.
THEY WERE married. At first they lodged with his father, Salomone Corcos, the old grain merchant, and there, in Via Vittoria, in the heart of what until not that long before had been the Ghetto, Jacopo was very soon to be born, and then Ruben. Half a dozen years or so would have to pass before the home in Via della Ghiara would be acquired: “magna, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed parta meo”† as Elia, whose temples had in the meantime become slightly flecked with white, was wont to say, half seriously, half facetiously.
To arrive there from the Brondi house, after you had got beyond the little alley on top of the city walls and hadn’t taken any shortcuts, would require a brisk walk of at least a half hour. You’d begin by leaving behind the Borgo San Giorgio, huddled around the big eponymous church with its brown bell tower. You’d continue by hugging the long, blind and monotonous wall of the mental asylum. At length, on the left, at the farthest extreme of the boundless plain, after the blue, wavy line of the Bologna hills begins to become visible, if you turn your head toward the city, your gaze will immediately be drawn to a grey facade, down there, laced about with Virginia creeper, the green blinds closed to protect the occupants from any intrusion of noise: a facade turned toward the south and so exposed to even the most minimal variation of light, with its blanchings and darkenings, its sudden reddenings and alterations, which very much suggested something living, something human.
If one looked at it, the house, from high up there on the city walls, one would have thought it a kind of farmhouse, with its fine flowerbed separated from the adjacent vegetable garden by a hedge, and with the vegetable garden that, full of fruit trees and divided by a thin central path, descended way down there to the sturdy surrounding wall. And there was certainly no danger of being intimidated while approaching from this side! thought Gemma’s father and brothers, who, on those afternoons when they came to chop wood, never failed to take the path along the wall. While, from up there, communicating by shouts and crude, brazen whistles, they never failed to feel, however confusedly, and without having ever said as much, as though between the look which the building itself from the second-floor windows and the dormer windows above gently levelled at the fields, and that look which a still youthful woman with her bust framed in the first floor’s wide-open window directed at them in the distance, through the already darkening air, a relationship of some kind existed, a secret similarity and affinity. She lifted an arm to greet them, and waved with festive insistence. They were welcome! she seemed to be saying. They should come in! Good Lord, didn’t they realize that the little gate at the foot of the wall, which allowed entry to the house also from the back, had been left ajar till darkness fell, just so that they could, if they wanted to, pass freely through?
From the opposite side of the house, the front, one would have no idea of all this.
It seemed like a dignified little construction of bare redbrick. And each time it seemed incredible to Elia’s relatives, when they came to visit, that the countryside whose existence Via della Ghiara, with its reserved and tranquil but still markedly urban aspect, almost made one forget, actually began no more than some fifty or so meters away, only just beyond the final veil of those mainly middle-class, though in some cases even aristocratic, facades, among which, without being harmed by the comparison, was to be found also that of Dr. Corcos.
Corcos, Josz, Cohen, Lattes or Tabet, whichever family it was, none of them, kith or kin, seemed at all intimidated by the brass rectangular plaque on which was inscribed: dr. elia corcos doctor & surgeon. When properly polished, it stood out on the street door with its fine, black, capital letters. And even if in their time they had severely criticized Elia for having taken a goy as a wife, and following that had also disapproved of his leaving the Ghetto quarter where he was born to establish himself in such a remote area of the city, this nevertheless, it should be added, was always with a secret sense of satisfaction that the main entrance should be so consecrated to him, Elia, and by extension to themselves. The look of the house, the quiet secluded nature of the district, likewise, even in its contrast to the medieval alleyways from which they’d come, was enough to reassure them. It showed that Elia, after all, had not changed, had remained one of their blood and upbringing: finally, unquestionably a Corcos.
This last fact having been firmly established, and since at this point it was clear that when he’d converted he’d hardly even considered it—what’s more, with his growing success as a doctor in both the city and the province, he conferred distinction on his shared origins, and his kin sooner or later would enjoy the benefits—at little more than forty years old, apart from being head of the Sant’Anna Hospital, he had become personal physician to the Duchess Costabili, by far the most chic and influential woman of Ferrara, leaving aside that after the premature death of her consort he was perhaps something more than just a personal physician to the duchess . . . So for everything else he could be excused, justified and, in certain particular cases, even applauded.
What the devil did it matter, for example, they would reason, that personally he issued from a less-than-mediocre family, son as he was of that inept fellow Salomone Corcos, that forgettable and undistinguished little merchant who had never done a thing in his life apart from begetting children into the world (he had a good dozen of them!) and ending up as a useless weight on the shoulders of Elia, the last of the series? And the wife he had chosen as well, a goy and, to make it worse, of low extraction (devoted, though, a capable housekeeper, a harder worker you couldn’t easily find, or even ever find, and also an incomparable cook), why should she be considered, as many continued to consider her, a kind of lead weight around his feet? No, no. If he, prudent and circumspect as he’d always been, had decided at a certain point to indulge himself in the luxury of a mésalliance, rather than having been merely constrained to make amends for a mistake made during one solitary night shift spent in the company of an exuberant girl (to end up in front of the magistrate on this account had never been considered absolutely remiss in Ferrara!), mightn’t it be that he had known exactly what he was doing? However it had actually come about, what was important was that he, despite all his eccentricities and oddities—including that of refusing after a certain date to make any contributions toward a bank established by the Italian School Synagogue, affirming that his conscience did not permit him to pretend to a faith in which he didn’t believe (except that, regarding circumcision, he was prepared to lend his full support to that small operation and even once to declare openly in the Temple that he wasn’t against the “custom,” corresponding evidently to hygienic norms also known in ancient times, and therefore, not unwisely, included within the religion)—what was important in the end was that he, to all intents and purposes, when it came down to brass tacks, continued to conform to the general rules.
And in this respect, in 1902, when little Ruben, only eight years old, died of meningitis, had it not perhaps been for everyone a delightful and consoling confirmation that on that occasion it was actually he, Elia, in contrast to his usual indifference to all things religious, who insisted that his second-born should be interred beside his grandfather Salomone with the most orthodox rites? The goyish wife, no: every now and then she had tried to rebel. Not only had she followed step by step the funeral from Via della Ghiara to the cemetery, but afterward, when the gravediggers had finished filling in the grave, she had thrown herself with open arms on the mound of fresh earth, to the dismay especially of Dr. Carpi, interrupted in the midst of his prayers, and had started crying that she didn’t want to leave her baby, her pòvar putòn,‡ there. Well, of course a mother’s always a mother. But what was she, Gemma, thinking? That a Corcos, rather than in the Jewish cemetery at the end of Via Montebello, so intimate, tidy, green and well-tended as it was, should be buried outside the walls, in the endless graveyard of the Charterhouse, where you could spend a whole day just trying to find a gravestone again? And, going back to that fit of weeping, Gemma was surely entitled to that. But her relatives, who arrived in large numbers for the occasion, they and the great horde of friends and acquaintances they dragged along with them, all unaware of the requirement to cover their heads—what made them display such desperation? And that other woman? Who on earth was that odd little woman with a black shawl around her head and that spinsterish air who, helped by Elia and by Jacopo (already so like his father, the boy: dark-haired, pale-faced, refined . . .), was trying in every way possible to lift Gemma up, but she, Gemma, shook her head and refused to get to her feet?
“Ausilia Brondi? Ah yes, her sister.”
Bumping into Ausilia by chance arriving at the door of Via della Ghiara, there was always one of Elia’s relatives ready to repeat this phrase. Cowed, Ausilia gathered her shawl around her throat. And at the click which the lock made, opened from the upper floors by a hand-pulled lever, she would hurriedly give way.
She stepped aside, the aged girl, lowering her eyes. How she would have preferred at that moment to return to her own house, her own family! But no: she too ended up going in, gently closing the big door, queuing up on the staircase in a huddled group with the others, who were busy chatting away to each other: she moved according to an instinct that, for at least forty years, had always been stronger than any will she had to resist it, to fight against it.
5.
THEY WOULD all find themselves together again on the first-floor landing, in front of another closed door. Even here, before someone came to open it, there was always something of a wait.
Finally, they would all be inside. And yet, remaining again behind—the visiting Jewish relatives had immediately gone directly ahead toward the kitchen—it often happened that Ausilia lingered on her own to roam round the rooms of the whole house, including at times those of the second and top floor, avoiding in her wanderings, apart from the storeroom for wood and the pantry on the ground floor, only the grey, half-empty and slightly scary granary under the roof. She would go through room after room, surveying one by one, with a strange kind of envious love, the innumerable familiar objects which cluttered them, the shelves overflowing with books and the notepads scattered everywhere, even in the passageways and in cabinets and cupboards, the ill-assorted furniture, the tables large and small, with the odd, complicated study lamps, the old canvases, nearly all in a parlous state, hung on the walls beside framed and glazed family and hospital photographs, and so on. In the meantime she kept repeating to herself, not without bitterness, that between them, the Brondis, and that tribe, so proud and reserved, who usually treated her as they did, it wasn’t possible to reach a real agreement or understanding of any kind that wasn’t merely superficial.
Even before seeing him again, she imagined the face of her brother-in-law.
In the big kitchen, where the copper pots and pans reflected back flames from the walls, and where, from his annual summer trips to Baden-Baden or to Vichy in the retinue of the Duchess Costabili, Elia would return every autumn with such an intense and imperious desire for peace and reflection—there, in a few minutes, he would appear to her again, seated as always at the desk placed under the window farthest from the entrance, perhaps just as he lifted his gaze from his books to look out beyond the vegetable garden, beyond the garden wall, which divided it from the city walls, beyond the walls themselves and to focus finally, smiling vaguely beneath his moustache, on the great golden clouds which filled the skies toward Bologna. Even just to imagine him, Elia, was enough for her to know once and for all that in the big kitchen filled with maids, with nurses from the Sant’Anna Hospital or from his clinic, with various Jewish relatives, with babies and children always shouting, often playing wildly and unrestrainedly, when not even Gemma, although his wife and the woman of the house, had ever managed to penetrate the invisible wall behind which Elia withdrew from everything that surrounded him, she the unmarried sister-in-law would never be able to occupy anything but a place apart, a little, very subsidiary and subordinate space. Her mother had been right to have always refused to enter that house! And her father and brothers, who, when they came there to chop wood, never wanted to go upstairs, so much so that at a certain point food and drink had to be taken down to them in the wood store—weren’t they, too, right to avoid any intimacy and confidence?
And yet there had been one who was utterly different from the rest of Elia’s relatives—a conviction that the years only strengthened in Ausilia’s mind.
The person in question was Elia’s father, poor Signor Salomone.
Having been married three times, he had twelve children, and though already very old indeed, and a widower for the third time when Elia got married, and very attached to the rented apartment in Via Vittoria where he had lived for more than half a century, regardless of all this, he had finally agreed to follow his beloved son, the doctor, to the house in Via della Ghiara, just in time, as it happened, to die at almost a hundred years of age.
To give an idea of this personage, let’s suppose him out walking. Should he perchance meet a woman whom he knew, it made no difference whether she was wearing the hat of a lady or a proletarian shawl, he would immediately, in a sign of respect, salted with a refined admiration if it was worth the effort, draw back completely against the wall or step down from the sidewalk. However religious and devoutly practicing he was (oh yes, marrying as he did, Elia must have dealt him, at least at first, a heavy blow), he would never speak of religion at home, neither in his own nor in other people’s homes. He would speak only in his own particular dialect, similar to Ferrarese, but full of the Hebrew words which were common in the vicinity of Via Mazzini, but that was all. And the fact was that in his mouth even those Hebrew words had nothing strange or mysterious about them. Who knows how, but even they took on the coloration of his continual optimism, his bountiful character.
When asked the time, he would draw from his waistcoat pocket a little silver wind-up watch, which at his death would be passed on to Jacopo, his first-born grandson, and, before checking the hour, raise it to his ear with a beatific expression. And often, even if no one had asked him (he was undoubtedly the meekest man, though at the same time a great patriot) he would tell of the distant time when Ferrara was still part of Austria and, in the main square, the white-uniformed soldiers were guarding the Archbishop’s Palace with fixed bayonets at the ready. People looked at these soldiers with scorn, with hatred. He too—he admitted—being at that time, before 1860, still quite young, did the same. And yet, thinking back—he would add—they were hardly to blame, those poor lads, mainly Czechs and Croats put there like stakes to prop up the vineyard of the cardinal-legate. Soldiers must do as they’re told, after all. Orders are orders.
Even more frequently, however, he would recall Giuseppe Garibaldi, who, he had no difficulty in admitting, had been the sun, the idol of his youth: he dwelt most of all on the general’s voice, strong and melodious like the finest of tenors, and such as to rouse the blood, which, one starry night in June of 1863, he, Salomone Corcos, lost in a crowd of enthusiasts, had heard, lift from the balcony of the Palazzo Costabili, where the hero of two worlds had been a guest for the whole week.
He had gone there with Elia when he was a small child, he used to recount, holding him in his arms for the entire duration of his speech, so that the youngest of his children—too young to remember another miraculous night only a few years earlier, when the gates of the Ghetto had been beaten down by the fury of the people—should from that time on preserve indelibly in his memory the image of the red-shirted, blond-haired Man who had created Italy. Garibaldi! He, Salomone, was carrying a not inconsiderable weight of family responsibilities, something like twelve children. And yet he felt that one word from the general—he always spoke haltingly in saying such things but reaching this point in the story he was almost short of breath—would have been enough, had it been necessary, for him to have followed him to the ends of the earth. The ends of the earth, and that’s for sure!—he would repeat with shining eyes. Whoever had heard Giuseppe Garibaldi speaking to the people would have done the same.
With Gemma he had always been gentle, kind and most attentive. And likewise in his relations with her, Ausilia, how affable he had been on every occasion, how courteous! For example: it often happened that, meeting her about the house, he would ask her about the price of vegetables, how much were the peas and the lettuce selling for, how much the potatoes, the beans and so on. But he did this, it was clear, above all to indicate to her that he had the greatest respect and consideration for her family, her family of vegetable farmers. “You are Ausilia, Gemma’s sister,” he might well have begun by saying. And he seemed quite pleased enough to have been able to figure it out on his own—since for some while his head, he explained, tapping his forehead with a finger and smiling, had been a bit faulty now and then.
But there was something of him, apart from his white curls shiny as silk, and his characteristically big nose, which she recalled in a special way. And that was the smell that wafted from his clothes.
A vague mixture of citrus fruits, of old grain and hay, it had the same smell which she had always noticed when she flicked through the ancient, indecipherable pages of some little books of Jewish rites that he brought with him to the house in Via della Ghiara, for their “eventual” distribution among the guests for the two suppers that followed Passover. They were illustrated by blueish, slightly faded engravings which showed, according to what one could read in the Italian printed beneath each of them, the Ten Plagues of Egypt, Moses before Pharaoh, the Passage through the Red Sea, the Rain of Manna, Moses on the Peak of Sinai speaking with the Eternal, the Adoration of the Golden Calf: and so on up until the Revelation to Joshua of the Promised Land. Elia’s frockcoat never smelled of anything but ether and carbolic acid. The clothes and the entire person of Salomone Corcos, by contrast, exhaled a perfume that, for all its different accents, reminded her of incense.
Placed in a chest of drawers in the so-called “good” room, a big shadowy place overlooking Via della Ghiara where no one ever set foot, the ritual Passover books had impregnated not just the furniture but the whole atmosphere with this perfume. Whenever she, Ausilia, went to shut herself up in there, remaining, seated in the darkness, to think over her own concerns for hours on end sometimes (she had continued to use this room as a kind of hiding place even after the death of Gemma when, in 1926, she had come to live with Elia and Jacopo as housekeeper, and even after both of them were deported to Germany in the autumn of 1943 . . .), she would always have the feeling that poor Signor Salomone was there too, within the four walls, present in flesh and blood. Just exactly as if, still in this world and silently breathing, he was seated beside her.
6.
LOVE WAS something different, Ausilia reflected—no one knew that better than her.
It was something cruel, atrocious, to be spied on from a distance, or to be dreamed of beneath lowered eyelids.
In fact, the secret feeling that from the very start had kept her bound to Elia, strong enough to force her for her whole life to be continuously, fatally, indispensably present, had certainly never given rise to the least joy. No, truly it hadn’t, if every time she entered the big kitchen of the house in Via della Ghiara where, near the window in the corner, he would linger over his studies until suppertime (he would study and seemed to notice nothing, and yet nothing really worth the trouble of being noticed would ever escape his intensely black, piercing, investigating eyes . . .), she felt a need to avoid that calm gaze which for a moment, at her entrance, had detached itself from a book, and the need quickly to summon, as if to defend her, the good and kind image of Salomone Corcos.
The gaze of Elia! Nothing could really escape it. And yet at the same time he seemed hardly to see anything . . .
That famous night on which he became engaged to Gemma (it happened in 1888, in August), and having returned very late, he passed his father’s bedroom on tiptoe, he stopped there for a moment, wondering whether to go in. Extract the tooth and be rid of the pain, he thought to himself. Perhaps it was best to tell his father everything straight away.
He was about to lower the door handle when from the other side he was taken aback by his father’s voice.
“Good Lord, where on earth have you been?” he cried out. “You know I haven’t been able to get a wink of sleep?”
These words of his father, and especially the keening tone of his voice, made him change his mind. Having climbed up to his own room, a little room which looked out over the roofs, the first thing he did was to open the window and lean out. Realizing it was already dawn (not a murmur from within the house, the city asleep at his feet, and down there one of the four towers of the Castle touched at its very tip by a fleck of pink light), he suddenly decided not only to forgo any sleep but without further delay to start studying.
Science—he then said to himself. Wasn’t Science his real calling?
It would be he, several decades later as Ausilia recalled, who told her all this, unprompted, at the end of one of the usual suppers that the two of them would take in the kitchen.
He was in front of her, the other side of the table, his face fully lit by the lamp above. While he spoke, grinning slightly beneath his big, brilliantly white moustache, he seemed to be watching her.
But did he actually see her? Truly see her?
It was—poor Gemma—certainly a very odd expression that he had in his eyes at that moment! It was as if, from the morning following the evening on which he’d promised her sister to marry her, as if from then on he had looked at things and at people in just that way: from above and, in some way, from beyond time.
* Ferrarese dialect word for the formidable peasant housewives of the neighboring countryside. Plural form: arzdóre.
† “parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non sordida, parta meo, sed tamen aere domus”: “Small, but adapted to my needs, subject to none, by no means miserable and bought with my own money” is the motto above the door of the house of the poet Ludovico Ariosto in Ferrara. Corcos has curtailed the quotation and has ironically substituted “magna” (large) for “parva” (small).
‡ Ferrarese dialect: “Poor little boy.”