A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini

1.

WHEN, in August 1945, Geo Josz reappeared in Ferrara, the only survivor of the 183 members of the Jewish community whom the Germans had deported to Germany in the autumn of 1943, and all of whom were generally believed to have ended up in the gas chambers, no one in the city at first recognized him.

Josz. The surname certainly sounded familiar, having belonged to that Angelo Josz, the renowned salesman of wholesale fabrics, who, although a Fascist at the time of the March on Rome, and even remaining in the Ferrarese circle of friends around Italo Balbo at least until 1939, hadn’t, for all of that, managed to protect himself and his family from the great raid and roundup that occurred four years later.^* Yet how could one believe—many immediately objected—that this man of uncertain age, enormously, absurdly fat, who’d appeared a few days earlier in Via Mazzini right in front of the Jewish Temple had turned up alive from no less a place than the Germany of Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, and so on, and above all that he, he of all people, was seriously one of the sons of poor Signor Angelo? And then, even conceding that it wasn’t all a sham, a fabrication, that among that group of Jewish townsfolk sent off to the Nazi death camps there might indeed have been a Geo Josz, after so much time, so much suffering dealt out more or less to everyone, without distinction of political affiliation, wealth, religion or race, what did this character want just then, at that particular time? What was he after?

But better to proceed in an ordered manner, and, tracking a little way back into the past, to begin with the first moment of Geo Josz’s reappearance in our city: the moment where the story of his return should properly begin.

In writing an account of it, there’s the risk that the scene might look rather implausible, a piece of fiction. Even I have doubts about its veracity every time I consider it within the frame of what for us is that familiar, usual street: Via Mazzini, the street, that is, which leaving the Piazza delle Erbe, and flanking the quarter of the erstwhile Ghetto—with the San Crispino Oratory at the foot, the narrow cracks of Via Vignatagliata and of Via Vittoria halfway down, the baked-red facade of the Jewish Temple a little farther on, as well as, along its entire length, the crowded rows of stores, shops and little outlets facing each other—still serves today as the main route between the historic center and the Renaissance and modern parts of the city.

Immersed in the brilliance and silence of the early afternoon, a silence which at wide intervals was interrupted by gunshots, Via Mazzini seemed empty, abandoned, preserved intact. And so too it appeared to the young worker who, from one-thirty on, mounted on some scaffolding with a newspaper hat covering his head, had been busy about the marble slab which he’d been employed to affix at two meters height on to the dusty brickwork of the synagogue’s facade. His appearance was that of a peasant forced by the war to seek work in the city and stand in as a plasterer, but whatever the telltale signs of this were, they would be obliterated in the blazing light, as he himself was well aware. Nor was this annihilating effect of the big August sun at all counteracted by the small group of passers-by, various in color and behavior, which had gathered on the cobblestones behind his back.

The first to stop were two young men, two partisans with beards and spectacles, in short trousers, red scarves round their necks, submachine guns on gun-belts: students, city gents—the young peasant plasterer had thought, hearing them talk and turning for a moment to peek at them. Soon afterward they were joined by a priest in his black vestments, undaunted by the outrageous heat, and then a sixty-year-old from the middle classes with a pepper-and-salt beard, a jovial air, his shirt open to reveal the skinniest chest and a restless Adam’s apple. The latter, after having begun to read in a low tone what was presumably written on the tablet, name after name, had interrupted himself at a certain point by exclaiming with emphasis: “A hundred and eighty-three out of four hundred!” as if those names and those numbers might have a direct bearing also on him, Podetti Aristide from Bosco Mésola, who found himself working in Ferrara by chance, and had no intention of staying a day longer than was necessary, and meanwhile was minding his own business and nothing else. Jews, he now heard it said by a growing number of people. A hundred and eighty-three Jews deported to Germany, who died there, in the usual way, out of the four hundred who lived in Ferrara before the war. So that was cleared up. But just a second. Since those hundred and eighty-three must have been sent to Germany by the Fascists of the Republic of Salò,^† what if one day or another they, the tupín,^‡ should return to take control, and were biding their time in the hope of a rematch? It was a fair bet that they’d been walking around the streets for some time and in all likelihood they’d have one of those red handkerchiefs round their neck! Taking that into account, wasn’t it better that the Jews, too, pretended not to know anything about it? Ah the tupín! You can imagine that at the right moment they could suddenly resurface, clad once more in their mud-camouflage uniforms, with those death’s heads on their fezzes and pennants! No, no. Given the state of things, the less one knew about who was a Jew and who wasn’t, the better, for all concerned.

And it was that unfortunate boy, so determined to know nothing, as he was happy enough to be working and wasn’t interested in anything else, and so diffident about whatever else was going on, imprisoned in his rough Po Delta dialect as he turned his back to the sun, who, at a certain point, feeling his calf touched—“Geo Josz?” asked a mocking voice—twisted round, suddenly, annoyed.

Before him stood a short, thickset man, his head covered up to his ears by an odd fur beret. How fat he was! He seemed swollen with water, a kind of drowned man. Still, there was no reason to be scared since, in an apparent effort to win his sympathy, the man was laughing.

His look turned serious and he pointed at the tablet.

“Geo Josz?” he repeated.

He began to laugh again. But quickly, as if contrite, and seeding his speech with frequent “Pardon me’s” in the German fashion—he expressed himself with the elegance of a drawing room orator of another age, and Podetti Aristide stood listening to him with his mouth agape—he confessed himself unhappy, “Believe me,” to have disrupted everything with an intervention which had, he was more than ready to recognize, all the qualities of a gaffe. Ah well—he sighed—the tablet would need to be remade, given that the Geo Josz, up there, to which in part the tablet was dedicated, was no other than himself, in flesh and blood. Unless that is—he immediately added while surveying them all with his blue eyes—unless the civic committee, accepting the fact as a hint from destiny, didn’t immediately give up the whole idea of a commemorative tablet, which—he grinned—though, affixed in that busy place, it would offer the indubitable advantage of almost forcing passers-by to read it, would also have the adverse effect of clumsily altering the plain, honest facade of “our dear old Temple,” one of the few things remaining the same as “before” in Ferrara, thanks be to God, one of the few things that one could still rely on.

“It’s a bit like you,” he concluded, “with that face, with those hands, being forced to wear a dinner jacket.”

And so saying he showed his own hands, calloused beyond imagining, but with their backs so white that an identification number tattooed on to the skin, soft, as if boiled, a little above the right wrist, could be distinctly read: with its five numbers preceded by the letter “J.”

2.

IT WAS thus that, pallid and swollen, as if he had emerged from the depths of the sea—his eyes a watery cerulean coldly looked up from the foot of the low scaffolding: not at all threatening, but rather ironic, even amused—Geo Josz reappeared in Ferrara, among us.

He came from far away, from much further away than he had actually come. Returned when no one expected him; what was it he wanted now?

To face a question of this kind with the requisite calm would have needed a different time, a different city.

It would have needed people a little less scared than those from whom the city’s middle class devolved their opinions (among them were the usual lawyers, doctors, engineers and so on, the usual merchants, the usual landowners; not more than thirty, to count them one by one . . .): all good folk who, although they had been convinced Fascists until July 1943, and then from December of that same year, had in some fashion said yes to the Social Republic of Salò, for more than three months had seen nothing but traps and pitfalls all around them.

It’s true, they would admit, they had taken the membership card for the Republic of Salò. Out of a civic sense they’d taken it, out of patriotic sentiments, and in each and every case not before the fatal 15 December,^§ in Ferrara, and the following outbreak across all of Italy of the fratricidal struggle.

But to get quickly to the point about that young fellow Josz, they would continue, raising their heads and swelling their chests under jackets in the buttonholes of which some of them had attached whatever decoration happened to be at hand—what was the sense in his going on covering his head, regardless of the stifling August heat, with a big fur cap? And his endless grinning? Instead of behaving in that manner, he would have done far better to explain how on earth he’d become so fat. As till then no one had heard of an oedema brought on by hunger—this must have been a joke put about in all likelihood by himself, the one most concerned—his fatness could only mean one of two things: either that in German concentration camps one didn’t suffer from the terrible hunger that was claimed in the propaganda, or that he had managed, who knows at what price, to enjoy a very special and respectful treatment. So surely he should behave himself, and stop going around annoying people? Those who go seeking the mote in other people’s eyes should look to the proverbial beam in their own.

And what could be said of the others—a minority, to tell the truth—who barricaded themselves in their houses with their ears peeled to catch the least sound from outside?

Among them, there was one with the tricolor scarf around his neck who had offered to preside at the public auctions for the goods sequestrated from the Jewish community, including the furnishings, the silver candelabras and everything from the two synagogues, one above the other, in the Temple of Via Mazzini; and there were those who, covering their white hairs with Black Brigade caps, had undertaken the role of judges in a special court responsible for various executions by firing squad, who had shown, it seemed, no prior sign at all of being in any particular way interested in politics, but rather, in the majority of cases, had led a largely retired life, dedicated to their families, their professions, their studies . . . And yet they were so frightened for themselves at this point, so fearful they might unexpectedly be called to account for their actions, that when Geo Josz, too, asked no more than to live, to start living again, even in such a simple, such a basic request, they found something personally threatening. The thought that one of them on a dark night might be secretly taken out by the “Reds,” led to the slaughter in some godforsaken place in the country, this terrible thought returned persistently to unsettle and torment them. To stay alive, to keep going in any way possible. They needed to survive. At any cost.

If only that wreck, they would jeer, would take himself away, would get the hell out of Ferrara!

The partisans, having appropriated what had been the HQ of the Black Brigade, were using the house in Via Campofranco still owned by his father, and therefore now his, his alone, as their barracks and prison. So he made do with carting around his ominous face everywhere it wasn’t wanted, with the quite evident aim of continually goading those who, sooner or later, would have to settle all of his accounts. It was scandalous, at any rate, that the new authorities should put up with this state of affairs without so much as batting an eyelid. It would be useless appealing to the prefect, Dr. Herzen, who the day after the so-called Liberation had been made president by that same Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale^¶ over which, after the events of December 15, 1943, he had secretly presided—useless because, if it was true, which it certainly was, that every night behind closed doors they updated lists of proscribed persons in his office in the castle . . . Oh yes, how well they knew that kind of person who, in 1939, had let himself be evicted without a word of protest, as though it were nothing, from the shoe factory a couple of kilometers along the road to Bologna, near Chiesuol del Fosso, which at that point he owned, and which later, during the war, had ended up as a pile of rubble! With his half-bald head, his feeble pretence of being a good paterfamilias, with his eternal smile full of gold teeth, with his fat lenses for myopia encircled by tortoiseshell rims, he presented that meek aspect (apart from the rigid straight spine which seemed screwed to the bicycle saddle he was inseparable from: a spine that was so in keeping with his Jewish surname, with its not-so-distant German origin . . .) characteristic of all who should be seriously feared. And what about the archbishopric? And the English governership? Wasn’t it precisely an unfortunate sign of the times that even from such quarters there was never any response, apart from a sigh of desolate solidarity or, worse, a smile poised between mockery and embarrassment?

You can’t reason with fear and with hatred. Though had they wanted to understand with the minimum of effort what was turning over in the soul of Geo Josz, it would have been enough for them to return to the moment of his first reappearance in front of the Jewish Temple in Via Mazzini.

That moment will perhaps be best recalled by the middle-class man of about sixty years of age, the one with the sparse little greying beard and the dry-skinned throat, who was among the first to stop under the commemorative tablet for the Ferrarese Jews deported to Germany, raising his shrill voice (“A hundred and eighty-three out of four hundred!” he had proudly cried out) to call the attention of all present to the importance of its inscription.

Having been present in silence when the sixteen-year-old survivor made a display of his hands, he immediately made his way through the small crowd to kiss him noisily on the cheeks, the latter, however, with his hands and forearms still nakedly extended before him, merely exclaimed in a noticeably cold tone, “With that ridiculous little beard, my dear Uncle Daniele, I didn’t recognize you.” A phrase which should have at once been considered very telling indeed. And not only about his identity.

And so he continued: “Why the beard? Have you decided, perhaps, that a beard suits you?”

Tightening his lips, he surveyed with a critical eye all the beards of various thickness and measure which the war, rather like the profusion of fake identity cards, had made such a common feature, even in Ferrara—it really seemed as if he were only concerned with that. But rather than the beards it was clear that there was something else, everything else that was troubling him.

In the immediate vicinity of that which, before the war, had been the Josz house, at whose door uncle and nephew presented themselves that same afternoon, there were to be seen, naturally, a good number of beards. And this contributed not a little in giving to the low building of exposed red brickwork, topped by a slender Ghibelline tower and extensive enough to cover almost the entire length of the secluded Via Campofranco, a grim, military air, fitting perhaps to recall the old owners of the establishment, the marqueses Del Sale, but it didn’t in the slightest remind one of Angelo Josz, the Jewish wholesale-cloth dealer who had bought it in 1910 for a few thousand lire, and who ended up in Germany with his wife and children.

The big street entrance door was wide open. In front of it, seated on the steps, with machine guns between their bare legs or lounging on the seats of a jeep parked by the high wall opposite which encircled a huge, burgeoning garden, a dozen partisans were lazing about. But there were others, in greater numbers, some with voluminous files under their arms and all with energetic, determined faces, who kept coming and going. Between the street, half in shadow, half in sunlight, and the wide-open entrance of the old baronial house, in short, there was an intense, vivid, even joyful bustle, fully in keeping with the shrieks of the swallows that swooped down, almost grazing the cobblestones, and with the clacking of typewriters that issued ceaselessly from the barred ground-floor windows.

When this odd couple, one tall, thin and wild-looking, the other, fat, sluggish and sweaty, finally decided to step inside the entrance, they immediately attracted the attention of that company—nearly all of them boys, mostly bearded and long-haired, and armed. They gathered round, some rising from the rough benches placed along the walls. And Daniele Josz, who clearly wanted to show off to his nephew his familiarity with the place and its new occupants, was already briskly replying to every question.

By contrast Geo Josz kept silent. He stared one by one at those suntanned, rosy faces which pressed up close to them, as if beneath the beards he hoped to discover some hidden secret, to investigate some taint.

“And they haven’t even offered me a drink,” his smile seemed to be saying.

Having become aware, at a particular moment, with a sidelong glance whose meaning was clear, that beyond the vestibule, right at the center of the adjacent, rather dark and narrow garden in disarray, there still shone a big, full magnolia, he seemed to grow more contented and calm. But that only lasted a moment. Since very soon after, upstairs in the office of the young Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia^# Secretary for the region (who in a couple of years would become the most brilliant Communist deputy in all of Italy, so very kind, courteous and reassuring as to provoke wistful sighs from not a few young women of the city’s best families), Geo repeated with a slight sneer: “You know that beard of yours doesn’t suit you at all.”

It was at this moment, however, in the embarrassed chill that suddenly fell upon what, until then, mainly to the credit of Uncle Daniele, had been quite a cordial conversation, in the course of which the future honorable gentleman had brushed aside the polite “lei” form used by the survivor, insisting on the “tu” of contemporaries and party comrades, that the motive for which the other was there suddenly became clear. If only all those who in the following days built up so many futile suspicions about him had been present at this point.

That house, his look seemed to say as it shifted away from the typist on whom it had alighted and became suddenly menacing (so much so that the girl at once stopped tapping on the keys), that house where they, the Reds, had settled themselves in for more or less three months, replacing those others who had occupied it before—that is, the Blacks, the Fascists—actually belonged to him, had they forgotten? By what right had they taken possession of it? Both she, the graceful secretary, and he, the likeable and hearty partisan chief, so determined to their credit to make a new world, of a sudden became very careful about how they spoke. What were they thinking? That he would be happy to be lodged in a single room in the house? And would that be the very room in which they were speaking? Was that the one they had in mind to keep him quiet and on his best behavior? If so, they were seriously mistaken.

There was a big sing-song going on down in the street:

The wind blows and the storm howls,

Our shoes have holes, but we must march on . . .

Not a chance. The house was his, make no mistake. They would have to give it back, lock, stock and barrel. And as soon as possible.

3.

DURING THE wait for the Via Campofranco establishment to return effectively and entirely into his possession, Geo Josz seemed happy to occupy a single room. To be a guest.

More than a room, in effect it was a kind of granary built at the top of the crenellated tower that overshadowed the house: a big, bare room into which, after having climbed no fewer than a hundred steps that culminated in a rickety, little wooden staircase, one entered directly into a space once used as a lumber-room. It had been Geo Josz himself, with the disgusted tone of someone resigned to the worst, who had been the first to speak of that “makeshift” solution. All right then, he would adapt himself for the moment, he had said with a sigh. But on the understanding, it should be made very clear, that he could also make use of the lumber-room which was beneath the actual granary, where . . . At this point, without finishing the sentence, he lapsed into a brief, mysterious grin.

From that height, however, through a wide window, it was soon apparent that Geo Josz could follow everything that happened not only in the garden, but also in Via Campofranco. And since he hardly ever left the house, presumably spending hour after hour looking at the vast panorama of russet tiles, vegetable gardens and the distant countryside which extended beneath his feet, his continual presence became for the occupants of the floors beneath, to put it mildly, annoying and irksome. The cellars of the Josz house, all of which opened on to the garden, had been made over into secret prison cells in the era of the Black Brigade. About these, even after the Liberation, many sinister stories continued to circulate in the city. But now, under the probably treacherous surveillance of the guest in the tower, evidently they could no longer serve the purposes of secret and summary justice for which they had once been destined. With Geo Josz installed in that sort of observatory, and perhaps, as was attested by the light of the oil lamp which he kept lit from the first signs of dusk until dawn, vigilant at night also, now there was no chance of relaxing, not even for a moment. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning after the evening when Geo Josz had appeared for the first time in Via Campofranco, when Nino Bottecchiari, who had stayed up working in his office until that time, had, as soon as he’d reached the street, raised his eyes to the tower. “Beware, all of you!” warned the light of the survivor suspended in mid-air against the starry sky. Bitterly reproaching himself for his culpable frivolity and acquiescence, but at the same time, like a good politician, preparing himself to confront a new reality, the young, future honorable gentleman, with a sigh, climbed on board the jeep.

But it also happened that, at the most unsuspected times of day, Geo soon began to appear on the stairs or down at the entrance, walking past the partisans permanently assembled there and wearing the usual minimal uniforms, clad in impeccable olive-colored gabardines which almost immediately had replaced the bearskin, leather jackets and tight, calf-hugging trousers they had when they arrived in Ferrara. He would slope off without greeting anyone, elegant, scrupulously shaved, with the rim of his brown felt hat on one side tilted down over his ice-cold eye. By the silence and unease provoked each time he appeared, from the outset he displayed his authority as the house-owner, too well brought up to argue but assured of his rights which his mere presence sufficed to assert and to remind the inconsiderate and defaulting tenant that enough was enough, he should clear out. The tenant shilly-shallies, pretends not to notice the steady protest of the proprietor, who for the moment is saying nothing, but the time is sure to arrive when he calls him to account for the ruined floors, the scratched walls and so on, so that month by month his position worsens, becomes ever more uncomfortable and precarious. It was late, the day after the 1948 elections, when much in Ferrara had already changed, or rather changed back to how it was before the war (the deputyship of the young Bottecchiari had by then triumphantly come about), when the ANPI decided to transfer its premises to the three rooms of the former Fascist headquarters on Viale Cavour, where since 1945 the local employment federation had established itself. Given the silent and implacable behavior of Geo Josz, this transfer already seemed more than a little unresponsive and tardy.

He hardly ever went out, as if to make sure that no one in the house should forget him even for a moment. Yet this didn’t stop him every now and then from being seen in Via Vignatagliata, where since September he had been granted permission that his father’s warehouse, in which the Jewish community had been piling the goods that had been stolen from Jewish houses during the Salò period and had remained for the most part ownerless, should be cleared “due to absolutely indispensable and urgent restoration work,” as he wrote in a letter, “and for the reopening of the business.” Or more rarely he might be seen along the Corso Giovecca—with the uncertain step of someone advancing into forbidden territory and whose mind is divided between the fear of unpleasant encounters and the bitter desire, perfectly contrary, to have them—taking the evening passeggiata which had been resumed in the city center, as lively and vibrant as ever; or else at the hour of the aperitif, at a table at the Caffè della Borsa in Corso Roma, sitting down abruptly, as he would always arrive out of breath and drenched with sweat. His attitude of ironical scorn—which soon enough had even prompted Uncle Daniele, so expansive and electrified by the atmosphere of those early post-war days, to give up on any conversation through the trapdoor to the granary above his head—hardly seemed to have discouraged the show of cordial salutations, the affectionate greetings of “Welcome back!” which now, after the initial uncertainty, began to rain in on him from all sides.

They stepped out from the entrances of the shops next to the warehouse, hands outstretched with the air of people ready for any moral or material sacrifice, or crossed the Corso Giovecca, despite its breadth, and with excessive, histrionic gestures threw their arms round his neck; or they leaped out from the Caffè della Borsa, still immersed in that same subversive half-darkness of the depths in which once, every day at one o’clock, had issued the radio announcements of military defeats (announcements that had barely reached the bike of the boy Geo in the days when he would speed past . . .), to sit by his side under the yellow awning, which was inadequate protection not only against the blinding glare but also against the dust which the wind swept up in broad whirls from the ruins of the nearby quarter of San Romano. He had been at Buchenwald and—the only one—had returned, after having suffered who knows what torments of body and soul, after having witnessed who knows what horrors. So they were there, at his service, all ears to hear him. He recounted; and they—also to show their contrition at having been so slow to recognize him—would never tire of hearing him, willing even to renounce the lunch to which, tolling twice, the Castle clock above was calling them. While they displayed, almost in testimony of their good faith and in support of the evolution that their ideas had undergone in those terrible, formative years, the rough canvas trousers, the partisan desert jackets with rolled-up sleeves, open collars without a trace of tie, feet slipped without socks into shoes and sandals resolutely unpolished, and, of course, beards—there wasn’t one of them without a beard—it was as if they were all saying in unison: “You’ve changed, don’t you see? You’ve become a man, by God, and fat as well! But see—we too have changed, time has passed for us too . . .” And they were undoubtedly sincere in exhibiting themselves for the examination and judgement of Geo, and sincere in being pained by his inflexible rejection of their overtures. Just as sincere, in its way, was the conviction held, at least in part, by everyone in the city, even those who had most to fear from the present and most to doubt from the future, the conviction that, for good or bad, from now on there was going to begin a new era, incomparably better than that other one which, like a long sleep filled with atrocious nightmares, was ebbing away in their blood.

As regards Uncle Daniele, who for three months had been living on his wits without knowing each morning where he would be sleeping that night, the suffocating cubbyhole in the tower had at once seemed, to his incurable optimism, a marvellous acquisition. No one was more convinced than he that with the end of the war had begun the glad era of democracy and of universal brotherhood.

“Now at last one can breathe freely!” he had ventured the first night that he’d come into possession of his little cell. He spoke these words, supine on a horsehair mattress, with his hands gripped behind his neck.

“Now at last one can breathe freely, aah!” he had repeated more loudly.

And then: “Doesn’t it seem to you, Geo,” he had continued, “that the atmosphere in the city is different, really different than before? It can’t be denied. Only freedom can produce such miracles! As for me, I’m really convinced . . .”

What Daniele Josz was really convinced about, however, must have seemed of quite dubious interest, as the only reply Geo vouchsafed to the impassioned apostrophes of his uncle from the opening of the little staircase was either a “Hmm!” or a “Really?”, which hardly inspired further utterance. “What on earth will he do?” the old man asked himself, growing silent, while his eyes turned toward the ceiling to follow the slapping back and forth of a pair of indefatigable slippers. And for a short while at least he abstained from further comment.

It seemed inconceivable to him that Geo did not share his enthusiasms.

Having fled from Ferrara during the days of the armistice, he had spent more than a year hidden in an obscure village in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, looked after by peasants. Up there, after the death of his wife, who, poor thing, had had to be buried under a false name in the little graveyard, he had joined up with a small band of partisans, assuming the role of political commissar—a circumstance which would soon allow him to be among those suntanned and bearded men who, perched on top of a truck, would be the first to enter liberated Ferrara. What unforgettable days those were! What joy it had been for him once again to be in the city, half in ruins it’s true, almost unrecognizable, but utterly cleared of all the Fascists of every kind, the early enrolled as well as the late! What a pleasure to once again be able to sit at a table in the Caffè della Borsa (a place where no sooner had he arrived than he had chosen it as the premises for resuming his old, modest insurance business) without any threatening look to chase him away, but rather finding himself the center of a general sympathy! But Geo?—he wondered. Was it possible that Geo felt nothing of what he himself had felt some months before? Was it possible that having descended into hell and by some miracle returned, he should feel no impulse beyond that of motionlessly reliving the past, as witnessed by the frightening series of photographs of his dead—Angelo and Luce, his parents, and Pietruccio, his little brother who was just ten years old—which one day when he had stealthily slunk up to the big room he had found decorating all four of its walls? And finally, was it possible that the only beard in the whole city that Geo found bearable was that of the old Fascist Geremia Tabet, his father’s brother-in-law, so esteemed by the regime that he managed to keep on frequenting even the Merchants’ Club, at least every now and then, for at least two years after 1938? The night after the day of Geo’s reappearance, he, Daniele Josz, with profound unease, had had to follow him to the Tabet house, in Vicolo Mozzo Roversella, where before then he had never dreamed of setting foot. And then, wasn’t it shocking that Geo, when the old Fascist stuck his nose out of a first-floor window, had let forth a shrill cry, ridiculously, hysterically, almost wildly impassioned? And what was that cry for? What did it mean? Did it mean perhaps that Geo, despite Buchenwald and the extermination of all his closest family, had become what his father, poor Angelo, had continued being in all ingenuousness till the very end, even perhaps up till the threshold of the gas chamber: a “patriot,” as he frequently loved to declare himself with such stalwart pride?

“Who’s there?” had asked the hesitant, worried voice above.

“It’s me, Uncle Geremia, it’s Geo!”

They were standing below in front of the big closed door of the Tabet house. It was ten o’clock at night and one could hardly see a thing down in the alley. Geo’s strangled cry, Daniele Josz recalled, had taken him by surprise, pushing him into a state of extreme confusion. What should he do? What could he say? But there was no time to consider. The big door had opened and Geo, having rapidly entered, was already striding up the dark stairs. He needed to run after him, at least try to reach him.

He managed to do so only at the second staircase, where, to make things worse, before the opened doorway to the apartment, Geremia Tabet himself stood waiting. With the light from inside at his back, the old Fascist, in slippers and pyjamas, was staring at the two of them, perplexed but not dumbfounded, having resumed his habitual calm.

He had stopped at the edge of the landing, half-hidden in the shadow. When he had seen Geo, who, by contrast, had kept advancing and abruptly clasped his uncle in a frenetic embrace, the latter suddenly felt himself again to be the poor relative whom all of them (his brother-in-law Angelo perfectly in agreement about this along with his wife’s family) had always kept at a distance mainly because of his political convictions. No, no, Daniele said to himself at this point—not even on this occasion was he going to enter that home. Turning his back, he would have walked away. But, instead, what did he do? Instead, like the idiot he was, he had done the opposite. At his final reckoning, he had thought, poor Luce, Geo’s mother, was a Tabet. Who can tell—perhaps it was the memory of his mother, Geremia’s sister, that kept Geo from treating the nasty Fascist of the family with the coldness that type of character deserved? Natural enough in the circumstances, after the first affectionate greetings had been exhausted, it wouldn’t be surprising that the boy should collect himself and reestablish the right distance . . .

But in this he was to be sadly disappointed. For the rest of the visit, which lasted late into the night (as it seemed that Geo couldn’t bring himself to leave), he had had to witness, seated in a corner of the small dining room, shows of affection and intimacy that were little short of disgusting.

It was as if by instinct that between the two of them a binding agreement had been established, to which, before they went to bed, the others in the house also quickly conformed (Tani, the wife, so aged and wasted away! and the three children, Alda, Gilberta and Romano, all of them, as usual, hanging on the lips of their respective consort or parent . . .). The pact proposed by Geremia was the following: that Geo should not even hint indirectly at the political past of his uncle, and he, on his side, should abstain from asking his nephew to recount what he had seen and suffered in that Germany where even he, Geremia Tabet, unless there were proof to the contrary—this too should be remembered by all those who now thought they might confront him with minor errors in his youth, some merely-human mistake of political choice made in times so distant as to now seem almost mythical—had himself lost a sister, a brother-in-law and a much-loved nephew. And that was indisputable: the last three years had been terrible. For everyone. Still, things being as they were, a sense of balance and discretion should prevail over every other impulse—the past is past, and it’s futile to dig it all up again! Better look to the future. And as to the future, what did it have in store? Geremia had asked at a certain point—assuming the grave but benevolent tone of a paterfamilias who can look into the distance and make out many things there—what kind of plans did Geo himself have? If he was considering, just to suppose, reopening his father’s business—a most noble aspiration that he personally could only approve of, and it was worth remembering the Via Vignatagliata warehouse, that at least, was still there—then all to the good. Of course he wouldn’t fail to help secure the indispensable support of some bank or other. But apart from this, if in the meantime, since the Via Campofranco house was still occupied by the “Reds,” Geo wanted to stay for a while there with them, they could always no trouble at all, find a place to set up a camp bed, no trouble at all.

It was right then, at the words “camp bed,” Daniele Josz recalled, that he had raised his head, focusing all the attention of which he was capable. What was happening? he asked himself. He wanted to understand. He needed to understand.

Streaming with sweat, despite being in pyjamas, Geremia Tabet sat on one side of the big, black dining table, and once more doubtful, perplexed, with the end of his finger worrying at his little pointed grey beard (cut in the classic style of the Fascist squads, which he alone among the old Fascists of Ferrara had had the temerity, the untimeliness or perhaps, who knows, even the shrewdness, to conserve in its proper dimensions). It was on that grey pointed beard and that fat hand which prodded it, that Geo, while he smilingly declined the offer with a shake of his head, fixed his blue eyes with a fanatical stubbornness.

4.

AUTUMN CAME to an end. Winter arrived, the long, cold winter that we’re used to in these parts. Then spring returned. And slowly, along with the turning of the seasons, the past also returned.

I don’t know how believable what I am about to relate will be. It’s true that, not so long after, things occurred that would have induced one to imagine that a secret, dynamic relation existed between Geo Josz and Ferrara. Let me explain. Very gradually he grew thin, dried out, by slow steps resuming, apart from the sparse white hair of an absolute silvery whiteness, a face which his hairless cheeks rendered still more youthful, truly like a boy’s. But after the removal of the highest piles of rubble and an initial mania of superficial change had exhausted itself, little by little the city, too, began to reassume its old form of sleepy decrepitude which centuries of clerical decadence succeeding the distant, fierce and glorious times of Ghibelline rule had turned into an immutable mask. In short, everything rolled on and kept going. Geo, on one side, Ferrara and its society (not excluding those Jews who had escaped the massacre) on the other: each of them was suddenly involved in a vast, ineluctable, fatal flurry of activity. In concordance like two spheres attached by gears and spinning in a single, invisible orbit, which nothing could resist, or halt.

Then came May.

So was it just for this? someone smilingly asked. Was it just so that Geo’s blind regret for his lost adolescence should not seem quite so blind, that from the first days of the month rows of beautiful girls began once again slowly and gracefully to pedal back from their trips to the surrounding countryside, arriving by various routes at the center of town with their handlebars overflowing with wild flowers? And besides, wasn’t it for the same reason that the famous Count Scocca, disgorged from who knows what hiding place to lean his back like a little stone idol against the marble half-column which, for centuries, had kept upright one of the three gates to the Ghetto, had returned to his spot right at the corner of Via Vignatagliata and Via Mazzini?

And since, one late afternoon around the 15th of the month, a stream of young cyclists had almost finished their slow and graceful ascent of Via Mazzini itself, and were about to flow into the Piazza delle Erbe and beyond, laughing—before such a spectacle, always new and always the same, no one could surely begrudge the fact that at this point the count should be unwilling to abandon his station. The little stage of Via Mazzini presented on one side, against the sunlight, the serried and luminous ranks of cycling girls, and on the opposite side, grey as the ancient stonework against which he was leaning, Count Lionello Scocca. Well, everyone thought, why should one not be moved by the concrete manifestation of such an allegory, sagely and suddenly harmonizing everything: an anguished, atrocious yesterday, with a today so serene and full of promise? Certainly, it would never have crossed the mind of anyone who suddenly noticed the penniless old patrician resume, as though nothing had happened, one of his once customary vantage points—one from which someone with good eyesight and subtle hearing could scan the whole of Via Mazzini from top to bottom—to reproach him for having been a paid informer of the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo^** for years, or having been from 1939 to 1943 the director of the civilian section of the Italo-German Institute of Culture. That black, visibly re-tinted Hitler moustache—not to mention the unmistakable steeply tilted, dull-yellow straw hat, the toothpick gripped between thin lips, the big, sensual nose raised to sniff the reek of rubble that the evening breeze brought with it—might now inspire only sympathetic, even grateful reflections.

So it seemed scandalous that with regard to Count Scocca, all told just a harmless old relic, Geo Josz should behave in a manner that one had to consider alien to any basic sense of decency or discretion. The shock and embarrassment it caused were all the more difficult to swallow precisely because for a good while people had gotten used to smiling with benevolence and understanding at Geo and all his eccentricities, including his aversion to the so-called “wartime beards.” By the same standard, one could recognize a certain appropriateness that the faces of many gentlemen should now finally dare once more to show themselves in the light of day. And on this topic it was true, true as can be (reasoned one of the better informed) that the lawyer Geremia Tabet, Geo’s maternal uncle, had not cut off his beard and perhaps never would. But Good Lord, a poor creature like him! He also deserved a bit of understanding! It wouldn’t be that hard. Enough to make the connection between that pathetic, grey, pointed beard and the black Fascist jacket, the shiny high, black boots, the black felt fez which for years and years that fine professional had always displayed when he would turn up between midday and one o’clock every Sunday at the Caffè della Borsa, and whoever there was that might want to make a fuss about that would soon lose the courage to say a word.

From the beginning, what happened seemed impossible. No one could believe it. They just couldn’t imagine a scene in which Geo, who entered with his usual padded steps into Count Scocca’s field of vision as he stood at the corner of Via Vignatagliata, then, with a sudden bestial fury, delivered to the parchmenty cheeks of that old, resuscitated carrion two dry, really hard slaps, more worthy of a Fascist trooper of Balbo and his companions’ times, as someone actually remarked, rather than of a survivor of the German gas chambers. In any case, it really happened—dozens of people saw it. But on the other hand, wasn’t it odd that, straight away, different and contrasting accounts as to exactly what had happened should have circulated? It made one almost doubt, not only the basis of each of these accounts but even the real, objective event itself, that same double slap, so full and resounding, according to general opinion, as to be heard for almost the entire length of Via Mazzini, from the corner of Piazza delle Erbe, down there at the end, as far at least as the Jewish Temple.

For many, Geo’s gesture remained unprovoked and inexplicable.

A little before, he had been seen walking in the same direction as the girls on bicycles, letting himself be slowly overtaken by this procession and never once looking away from the street, his gaze full of stupefaction and joy. Having thus arrived in front of Count Scocca, and abruptly detaching his gaze from a trio of cyclists who had then come parallel with the Oratory of San Crispino, Geo stood stock still, as if the presence of the count, in that place and at that moment, seemed inconceivable to him. His halt, in any case, lasted no more than a second or two, the time required to knit his eyebrows, clench his lips and teeth, convulsively ball up his hands and mutter some words without sense. After which, as though released by a spring, Geo literally leaped on the poor count, who, until that moment, had showed no sign at all of having noticed him.

Is that the whole story? And yet there had been a motive, others objected, and a good one at that! Agreed, Count Scocca might not have been aware of Geo’s arrival. Even if rather strange, that couldn’t at all be discounted. But as for Geo, however, how was it possible to believe that just at the moment in which the three girls he was gazing fixedly at were about to disappear into the golden haze of Piazza delle Erbe, he had had the time or even the desire to notice the count?

According to these last, instead of merely observing the already almost vesperal scene, with no other concern than to immerse himself in the vague sense of how much the city and he were in perfect harmony, the count had actually done something provocative. And this something, which no one who was passing at a distance of more than a couple of yards could have possibly observed—for the good reason, among other things, that despite everything, the eternal toothpick continued to shift from one to the other corner of his mouth—this something consisted in a subtle sibilance, so weak as to seem shyly casual, an idle little fortuitous whistle, in short, which would surely have remained unnoticed if the tune it hinted at had been anything other than that of “Lili Marlene”:

Underneath the lantern by the barrack-gate . . .

the count whistled softly but clearly, his own gaze also, despite his seventy or more years, fixed rapturously on the cycling girls. Who can say? Perhaps having stopped his whistling for a moment, he had joined his own voice to the unanimous chorus that rippled along the sidewalk of Via Mazzini, murmuring in dialect, “Praised be the Lord for these beauties!” or even, “Bless you all and the busty saint who protects you!” But what good did it do him? Fortune decreed that that lazy, innocent whistling—innocent, you understand, to anyone else except Geo—rose to his lips just a fraction too soon. And the outcome for him was those two slaps.

There existed a third version, however, and the third, like the first, didn’t mention either “Lili Marlene” or any other whistling, whether more or less innocent or provocative.

According to this last interpretation, it had been the count who stopped Geo. “Ah ha!” he had said, under his breath, when he saw him so close. Geo had immediately halted. Then the count had engaged him in conversation, hitting the bull’s-eye the first time by announcing his full name: “Look who it isn’t!” he had said. “Could it really be Ruggero Josz, the eldest son of poor Angiolino?” For Lionello Scocca knew everything about Ferrara, and the nearly two years he had had to spend in hiding around Piacenza, just the other side of the river Po, under a false name, had not in the least clouded his memory or weakened his famous ability to recognize at a single glance one face in a thousand. And so, well before Geo had leaped on him and given him those violent slaps, for some minutes they had kept on talking calmly, the count interrogating Geo about his father, for whom, he had said, he always had the greatest affection, gathering the most detailed information about the fate of the rest of his family, including Pietruccio, and congratulating Geo on having survived it all; with Geo, on his side, replying sometimes a little awkwardly or reluctantly, it’s true, but nevertheless replying. In conclusion, they seemed no different at all from a couple of townsfolk lingering on the sidewalk to talk of this and that, waiting for darkness to fall. And yet the slaps still needed to be explained. How the devil had they come about? In the opinion of those who gave this account, and who never tired of returning to the theme with the most various of analyses and surmises, it was this that revealed quite what a bizarre character Geo was; it was this that showed just what an “enigma” he was.

5.

HOWEVER IT actually happened, what’s certain is that after that evening in May everything changed. Whoever wished to understand, understood. The others, the majority, at least realized that something serious and irreparable had occurred, the consequences of which could not now be avoided. They would have to put up with them.

It was the day after, for example, that people truly saw just how thin Geo had become during this period.

An absurd scarecrow—to the general wonder, unease and alarm, he reappeared dressed in the same clothes he had worn when he’d returned from Germany the preceding August, including the fur cap and the leather jacket. Now they fitted him so loosely—it was clear he hadn’t made the least effort to take them in—that they seemed to be draped on a clothes hanger. People saw him coming up the Corso Giovecca in the morning sun which gaily and peacefully shone down upon his rags, and couldn’t believe their eyes. So that was how he really was! they thought. In the last months he’d done nothing but grow thinner and thinner, bit by bit, till he was nothing but skin and bones! But no one could raise a laugh. To see him crossing the Corso Giovecca at the City Theater, then taking the Corso Roma (he had crossed the road as fearful of the cars and bicycles as an old man . . .), there were very few of them who didn’t feel themselves inwardly shudder.

And so, from that morning on, without changing his style of dress again, Geo installed himself, one might say, as a fixture at the Caffè della Borsa in Corso Roma, where even if the general, already fading condemnation of the Black Brigade’s recent torturers and assassins still held them at bay, still kept them in hiding, the old club-wielding dispensers of castor-oil purges from 1922 and ’24, which the war had somewhat cast into oblivion, began to show themselves again one by one. Clad in rags, Geo stared from his table at the little group of these latter figures with an air between challenge and imploration, and his behavior contrasted, to his disadvantage as you can guess, with the timidity, the evident desire not to draw too much attention to themselves which these ex-despots expressed with every gesture. By now old, innocuous, with the signs of wreckage that the years of misfortune had stamped mainly on their faces, and yet still reserved, well mannered, properly dressed, these latter persons displayed a demeanor that was a great deal more human, more decent, and more deserving of sympathy, even. So what after all did Geo Josz really want? a great many people once again began to ask, all of them in agreement that the period immediately after the war, which was so propitious for an examination of both the private and collective conscience, was now over, and this was a luxury that could no longer be afforded. It was the same old question, but framed with the brutal impatience that life, imperious in its demands, at this point unambiguously reasserted.

For these reasons, with the exception of Uncle Daniele, who was always brimming with indignation and a polemical impulse at the “conspicuous” presence at those same tables of some of the most renowned members of Ferrara’s earliest Fascist squads, it became increasingly rare that any of the habitués of Caffè della Borsa would be prepared to lift themselves off their seats, cross the few intervening yards and then sit down beside Geo.

And that’s not to take into account the unease which rewarded those few for their willing efforts of sociability—each time they felt an anxiety flecked with annoyance which they were unable to shrug off for at least two or three days. Frankly, it wasn’t possible, they would exclaim, to keep a conversation going with someone dressed so ludicrously! And besides, letting him speak, they would continue, meant that, sure enough, he’d again start telling about Fossoli, Germany, Buchenwald, the fate of his whole family and so on, so that it was impossible to know how to extract themselves. At the cafe, under the awning pummelled by the sirocco blowing across, and as ill-protected as the tables, chairs and the figures reckless enough to sit at them were from the full violence of the afternoon sun, while Geo chattered away unstoppably, there was nothing else to do but follow, from the corner of their eyes, the movements of the builder opposite busy plastering over the holes in the Castle moat’s parapet from the bullets left by the execution by firing squad on December 15, 1943. And he, Geo, what was he recounting in the meantime? Without assuming that this was already understood, perhaps he was repeating once again, word for word, the phrases that his father murmured to him before fainting on the path back to the Lager from the salt-mine where both of them were working. Or else, raising his hand in exactly the same way as he had done a hundred times before, he demonstrated the little wave goodbye his mother had given him some twenty minutes after the train had stopped in arrival at the deserted ghostly station in the middle of a forest of fir-trees, as she was pushed away bewildered among a group of women. Or else, with the look of someone about to impart some important news, he again began to tell of Pietruccio, his younger brother, seated next to him in the complete darkness of the truck that was conveying them from the station to the barracks, and who suddenly disappeared without a complaint or a cry, for ever . . . Horrible, of course, devastating. Still, there was no need to be hoodwinked, those who’d survived such protracted and depressing encounters would declare—you could tell how forced and exaggerated, in short, how false, these stories of Geo’s were. And then what a bore! they would add, puffing. Such things had been heard so many times that to have them administered once again (and by the same person as well!) when the Castle clock up there was ringing out hour after hour, one was frankly inclined to give up the ghost and make a run for it. No, let’s be clear, you’d need more than a leather jacket and a fur cap to help you swallow this kind of stale swill.

During the remaining months of 1946, the whole of ’47 and a good part of ’48, this ever more ragged and desolate figure was unceasingly before the eyes of the whole of Ferrara. In the streets, the squares, the cinemas, the theaters, around the sports fields, at public ceremonies: people would turn their heads and there he would be, indefatigable, always with that shadow of saddened bafflement in his eyes. To start holding forth—that was evidently his purpose. By now there was hardly anyone who didn’t keep him at bay, who didn’t flee him like the plague.

They continued to speak about him, that much, yes.

After Buchenwald, as could be heard in the nastier kind of gossip, it would make sense if he chose to stay at home or, if he went out, that he’d prefer to plod down the shadowy sidestreets like Via Mazzini, Via Vittoria, Via Vignatagliata and Via delle Volte, instead of the thoroughfares of the Corso Giovecca and Corso Roma. When he brought out his lugubrious deportee’s uniform again, never more wearing the fine olive-colored gabardine which Squarcia, undoubtedly the best tailor in the city, had cut to his exact measure, and then contrived to turn up wherever people were gathered to enjoy themselves or simply with the healthy desire to be together, what possible excuse could one find for such eccentric and offensive behavior?

From this perspective, they would continue, the scandal which happened at Club Doro in August 1946 (more than a year, it should be noted, after the end of the war), where, at its opening night Geo had the bright idea of turning up dressed in the same fashion, could stand as an apt example.

Nothing could be said against the place in itself. There was no other way to describe it than with a single word: magnificent. Conceived according to the most modern criteria, it was impossible to criticize, except for the fact that it had been constructed at about a hundred meters from the place where in 1944 the five members of the underground Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale had been executed by firing squad—this last detail without doubt rather unpleasant, as the young Bottecchiari, if one looked at the thing from his personal point of view, was perhaps not wrong to underline in the short, satirical article published by him in the Gazzetta del Po a couple of days after the opening. At any rate, only the mind of a madman like Geo could have conceived of an idea to sabotage a place which was so happy and convivial in that manner. What harm was there in it? If people now, as it would soon enough be clear, felt the need for a locale outside the walls, and somewhere no one would stop them enjoying themselves, somewhere that, immediately after leaving the cinema, it would be possible to go, not only to have a snack, but also to dance to the sound of the radio-gramophone among groups of friends and truck drivers in transit, to stay out even sometimes till dawn—well, didn’t people have the right to that? Deranged by the war, and anxious to help on its way the much predicted and wished-for reconstruction, society needed to let its hair down occasionally. Thanks be to God, life had begun again. And when it begins, as one knows, it doesn’t look back.

Suddenly faces that had, until then, expressed doubt and uncertainty, became bitterly questioning, lit up with malice. And what if the camouflage and self-exhibition of Geo, so insistent, and so irritating, had had a precise political intention? What if—and here they winked—with the passing of time he’d become a Commie?

That evening at the dance club, as soon as he came in, he began to show photographs of the members of his family who had died in Germany to left and right, reaching such a stage of petulance that he was trying to stop the boys and girls from moving off by grabbing hold of their clothes, and they, in that moment, as the radio had suddenly started madly up again, had to brush him off so as to get back onto the dance floor. These were not inventions at all, a great many of the most reliable people had been witnesses to the fact. So what else had Geo been referring to with those gestures of his, with those demented antics, with that bizarre and macabre pantomime, seasoned with his saccharine grins and half-imploring, half-menacing looks, unless it was that he and Nino Bottecchiari, having finally reached an agreement about the house in Via Campofranco, were now in alliance and total agreement about everything else, which is to say politics, which is to say Communism? But then, if he had accepted the role of useful idiot, wasn’t it more than justified that the Friends of America Club, which in all the chaos and enthusiasm of the immediate post-war period had thought it opportune to enroll Geo as one of their board members, had later, with due care, decided to cross him off the list? Let’s be clear: it’s likely that no one would have dreamed of chucking him out, if he hadn’t first of all wanted the scandal, and the moderate sanctions against him that followed. No, this was far from being nonsense! The proof could be seen that other famous night in February 1947—when he showed up at the door of the club dressed as a beggar and with his head shaved like a convict: truly reduced to a human wreck—that’s the word—the spitting image of the famous tramp, Tugnòn da la Ca’ di Dio—there, in the vestibule full of coats and furs, he had started to bawl that they should let him through, since whoever was enrolled and had paid their fees had the right to frequent the club how and when they wanted. Expelling someone is always unpleasant. Of course it is. Besides, wasn’t it true quite a while before that—to be exact, from the previous autumn—the board of directors of the Friends of America Club had voted unanimously to return as soon as possible to their old title of the Unione Club, once again reducing the enrolled membership to the aristocratic families of the Costabilis, the Del Sales, the Maffeis, the Scroffas, the Scoccas, etc., as well as the more select members of the bourgeoisie—Catholic, but in certain exceptional cases, also Jewish, drawn from the liberal professions and landowners? Like a swollen river that had broken its banks and hugely flooded the surrounding countryside, the world now needed to return to its original margins: that was the point. This explained, among other things, why even old Maria, Maria Ludargnani, who during the same winter had reopened her house of assignation in Via Arianuova—in just a few weeks, it became clear that this was the only, in some way public, place where it was still possible to gather and meet together without political or even apolitical opinion continually leaping out to poison all relations, and the evenings spent there, mainly chatting or playing gin rummy with the girls, were a reminder of the blessed times before the great upheaval—why even she had thought it necessary, that other time Geo had come to knock on her door, to tell him roundly and clearly, Nix, to go away, and in the end declaring in dialect, after making very sure with her eye to the spyhole that he’d been swallowed up again by the mist: “Agh mancava sol ach gnéss déntar anch clucalà!”^†† In conclusion: if no one had dreamed that Maria Ludargnani, prohibiting Geo’s entry to her “house,” had defrauded him of some right, then one had to admit that the Unione Club had acted toward him in a manner that was most proper, astute and responsible. And then just think about it! If you can’t exclude whomever you want from your own house, where is freedom, what sense is there in talking about democracy?

Only in 1948, after the April 18 elections, after the local ANPI section was forced to transfer to the three rooms in the ex-Fascist HQ in Viale Cavour—and with this the belated proof was given that the rumor of “adhesion” to the Communist Party of the Via Campofranco house’s owner was pure fantasy—only in the summer of that year did Geo Josz finally decide to abandon the game. Exactly like a character in a novel, he disappeared without warning, without leaving the slightest trace behind. At once some said he had emigrated to Palestine in the wake of Dr. Herzen, others claimed he’d gone to South America, yet others to some undefined “country beyond the Iron Curtain,” and others still that he had drowned himself in the Po, throwing himself at night from the height of the iron bridge of Pontelagoscuro which had been recently reconstructed.

This topic continued to crop up for the next few months: at the Caffè della Borsa, at the Doro, in Maria Ludargnani’s house of assignation, everywhere, to some extent. Daniele Josz was offered on more than one occasion the opportunity to hold a public enquiry. The lawyer Geremia Tabet also intervened to represent questions concerning the inheritance of his nephew. In the meantime: “What a madman!” was heard again and again.

They would shake their heads benignly, tighten their lips in silence, raise their eyes to the heavens.

“If he’d only had a bit of patience!” they’d add, sighing, and they were now, once again, sincere, once again sincerely regretful on his behalf.

Then they would say that as time heals everything in this world, thanks to which Ferrara itself was rising from the ruins the same as it had once been, so time would in the end have brought some peace even to him, would have helped him return to a normal life, in short, to reestablish him within the city. And yet instead the opposite had happened. He had preferred to go away. Disappear. Even to kill himself. To play the tragic hero. Exactly at this point when, renting out the big house on Via Campofranco and giving the right boost to his father’s firm, he would have been able to live very comfortably, like a gentleman, and to consider among other things making a new family for himself. But no, let’s be honest: they really had treated him with more than enough patience. The episode with Count Scocca, without even cataloguing the rest, should in the end be enough to reveal that, to demonstrate what kind of an eccentric he was, what sort of living enigma had landed among them . . .

6.

AN ENIGMA, that’s what it was.

And yet, in the absence of any more certain clues, if we consider that sense of the absurd, and simultaneously that feeling of revelatory truth, which any encounter can have just as dusk is falling, the episode with Count Scocca shouldn’t have seemed so enigmatic, shouldn’t have been anything that could not have been understood by a heart that felt a little solidarity.

It’s true that daylight is boredom, a hard sleep for the spirit, “tedious mirth,” as the Poet says. But in the end let the hour of dusk arrive, the hour equally woven of shadow and light of a peaceful dusk in May, and then note how the things and people that before had appeared utterly normal and indifferent can suddenly show themselves as they truly are: it can happen all at once—and then it is as though you’ve been struck by lightning—that they speak for the first time of themselves and of you.

“What am I doing here with this person? Who is this person?” And I, replying to his questions, playing along with him, who on earth am I?

Two slaps, after some moments of mute bewilderment, had been the thunderous reply to the insistent, albeit polite questions of Lionello Scocca. But to those questions there might well have been the alternate reply of a furious, inhuman cry—so loud that the whole city, as much of it as still remained standing beyond the deceptively intact scene of Via Mazzini, and as far off as the distant, breached walls, would have heard it with horror.

^* A mass demonstration in October 1922 that brought Mussolini to power. Italo Balbo was an Italian Blackshirt leader in Ferrara and one of the main organizers of the march.

^† The Germans restored Mussolini to power in northern and central Italy in September 1943, and set up a puppet state, the Social Republic, in Salò on Lake Garda that lasted until May 1945.

^‡ Ferrarese dialect for “mice,” but here referring to the Fascist-appointed squads of armed teenagers who patrolled the streets of Ferrara in the latter stages of the war.

^§ Eleven Ferraresi citizens were shot at dawn by Blackshirts near the Estense Castle on November 15, 1943. Bassani here, and in “A Night in ’43,” mistakenly but consistently places the massacre a month later, on December 15.

^¶ The Committee for National Liberation was formed in September 1943 in opposition to Italian Fascism and the German occupation.

^# ANPI (the National Association of Italian anti-Fascists) was a partisan organization formed in 1944.

^** OVRA (the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism) was a Fascist organization involved in surveillance.

^†† In Ferrarese dialect: “Just what we need— for that one there to be in here!”