The Final Years of Clelia Trotti

1.

TO call the vast, architectonic complex of Ferrara’s Municipal Cemetery beautiful, so beautiful as even to be consolatory, there’d be the risk, even among us, of provoking the usual sniggers, the superstitious gestures to fend off the evil eye always at the ready in Italy to greet any speech that refers to death without deploring it. All the same, once you arrive at the end of Via Borso d’Este, a perfectly straight little road, with the marble-cutting workshops huddled at the start and the florists at the end, and entirely overwhelmed by the thick foliage of the two big private parks on either side, the unexpected vista of Piazza della Certosa and of the adjacent cemetery, gives an undeniably joyful, almost festive impression.

To have an idea of what Piazza della Certosa is like, one should think of an open, nearly empty meadow, scattered as it is in the distance with some occasional funerary monuments for illustrious nineteenth-century lay-persons: a kind of parade ground. To the right, the rugged, unfinished facade of the church of San Cristoforo, and, curving in a wide semicircle until it reaches the city walls, a red, early-sixteenth-century portico on which, some afternoons, the sun beats down to magnificent effect; to the left, small, semi-rustic houses, the low boundary walls of the big vegetable gardens, and orchards of which even now, in this most northerly zone of the city, there is an abundance—only houses and low walls which, in contrast to those on the opposite side, do not offer the least obstacle to the long rays of afternoon or evening sunlight. In the space between these boundaries, there’s very little that speaks of death. Even the two pairs of terracotta angels right at the top of the portico, awaiting the signal from heaven to blow into the elongated bronze trumpets they’ve already put to their lips, have nothing about them that could really be considered threatening. They swell their red cheeks, impatient to blow, eager to play: the baroque artist must surely have found the likeness for the faces of these four robust-looking lads in the surrounding Ferrarese countryside.

It may be because of the dreamy sweetness of the place, and also, it should be said, its almost perfect and perpetual solitude, but the fact is that Piazza della Certosa has always been the favorite site for lovers’ trysts. Where would you go in Ferrara, even today, when you want to talk to someone a little away from the world? The first choice is Piazza della Certosa. There, should things proceed as might be hoped, it would be only too easy to move on later to the nearby city walls, where you can find as many places as you like away from the prying eyes of nursemaids that are so vigilant in the piazza around the hour of dusk. And if, on the contrary, the idyll doesn’t proceed, it would be just as easy and, at the same time, without any risk of being compromised, to return from there together toward the city center. This is a custom that has been established of old, a kind of ritual, probably as ancient as Ferrara itself. It was in force before the war, as it is today and will be tomorrow. True, the bell tower of San Cristoforo, docked halfway up by an English grenade in April 1945 and remaining thus, a sort of bloody stump, is there to declare that any guarantee of permanence is illusory, and therefore that the message of hope that the sunlit porticoes with their reddened heat seem to express is only a lie, a trick, a beautiful deception. Just as the bell tower of San Cristoforo has ceased to exist, without doubt, sooner or later, even the agile procession of arches that stretch like two arms up toward the light will cease to exist, to lull and delude the souls of those who contemplate it. Even this will come to an end sooner or later. As will everything. But in the meanwhile, only a few steps from the thousands and thousands of citizens who lie in row after row of the cemetery sited behind, on the vast grassy expanse scattered here and there with funerary steles and memorial stones, life’s peaceful, indifferent bustle goes on unperturbed, refusing to throw in the towel, to give up the ghost; what prophesy would seem more destined to be erased, to remain unheard in the excited atmosphere of the nearing dusk, than one which promises an inevitable, final nothingness?

The atmosphere of general, almost sporting excitement immediately provoked in Piazza della Certosa by a funeral cortège too different from the usual to pass unobserved, a cortège that one autumn afternoon in 1946 emerged from Via Borso with a big band at its head, couldn’t but immediately attract the attention of the habitués of the place—mainly nursemaids, children and enamoured couples, inducing the first, seated on the grass beside prams, to raise bewildered eyes from the newspaper or their sewing, the second to stop running after or playing with balls and the last to release their clasped hands and quickly draw back from each other.

The autumn of 1946. The war now over. And yet the first impression, observing the funeral which in that moment was making its entry into Piazza della Certosa, was to have been transported back to May or June of the previous year, to the fiery period of the Liberation. With a sudden leap of the heart and the blood, it was like once again being called on to witness one of those then typical and frequent examinations of the collective conscience by which an old, guilty society desperately tries to renew itself. No sooner had one noticed the thicket of red flags which followed the coffin, and the scores of placards inscribed with an assortment of slogans: ETERNAL GLORY TO CLELIA TROTTI or ALL HONOR TO CLELIA TROTTI, SOCIALIST MARTYR or VIVA CLELIA TROTTI HEROIC EXAMPLE TO THE WORKING CLASS etc., and the bearded partisans who carried them aloft, and above all the absence in front of the carriage of priests and clergymen, than one’s gaze hurried ahead to where the procession was making its way: a grave, that is, dug in the portion of the cemetery exactly in front of the main entrance to the church of San Cristoforo where, apart from an English protestant who had died from malaria in 1917, no one had been buried for more than fifty years.

And yet, returning to the funeral cortège, the head of which was by now only tens of meters from the humble, secular grave which was waiting open—another crowd in the meantime was unceasingly pouring out from Via Borso—even a slightly trained eye would quickly be aware, from innumerable details, how deceptive was that initial impression of a magical return to the atmosphere of 1945.

Let’s take, for example, the band. It’s worth specifying that it proceeded in front of, but was detached from, the carriage, and played Chopin’s funeral march in slow time. The brand-new uniforms worn by the band members, one of the boasts of the Communist administration only recently installed in the municipality, would undoubtedly have enchanted a foreigner, an uninformed newcomer, but not someone who, underneath the large caps with shiny visors in the style of the American police, was able to trace one by one the good-natured and dejected features of the Orfeonica’s^* old zealots, dispersed who knows where, poor devils, at the time of the shootings and ambushes that followed the break-up of the Front and the popular uprising. But the punctilious staging, so alien to the genial chaos typical of revolutions, was if possible even more evident in the compact formation of some fifteen arzdóre^† from the Po delta who, carrying in pairs great wreaths of carnations and roses, surrounded the funeral carriage on all sides like a guard of honor.

To see the earthy faces, deeply marked with fatigue, of these mature female heads of the family, all roughly the same age as Clelia Trotti, would be enough to be able to guess where they had come from and how they had arrived. Gathered together at Ferrara from the furthest villages of the Adriatic coast, at midday in the city they will certainly have found someone to offer them the refreshment of pastasciutta, a slice of roast beef and a quart of wine, but not the chance of a much-needed rest. The same bureaucratic mind that had provided a table adorned with red paper flags had then inflexibly decided that after the meal these ancient female farm laborers should clean themselves as best they could from their dusty journey and then put on, over their everyday clothes, a strange kind of tunic: red, naturally, and peppered with lots of tiny black hammers and sickles. Thus clad, they now appeared as it had been decreed that they should—almost like priestesses of socialism. But their heavy, bewildered steps, the wild stares which they cast about, gave them away only too clearly. It made one think that the laborious odyssey which, from the start of the day, they had already undertaken was sadly very far from being over. Shedding those tunics some hours later, then getting back into the same three or four cars that had transported them into the city, they would finally be restored to their impoverished dwellings only late at night. And who knows if before letting them depart anyone might remember to sit them down for a second around the table adorned with flags?

Immediately behind the funeral carriage, the authorities followed in several lines that filled the small space between the carriage itself and the undifferentiated crowd carrying flags and placards.

These were Socialists, Communists, Catholics, Liberals, activists, Repubblicani-storici:^‡ in short, the complete ex-directory of the last secret Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, reconstructed with all its members for the occasion. Added to and mixed in with this group, one noticed some other figures who were not, strictly speaking, political, such as the engineer Cohen, president of the Jewish community, and the newly nominated mayoress, Dr. Bettitoni.

So, even if the honorable Mauro Bottecchiari, usually known in Ferrara as “the prince of our forum,” couldn’t call himself the city’s most representative political figure after the recent administrative elections had seen the crushing victory of the Communists, it was to him, to his uncombed, silver head of hair, to his high-colored, loyal, convivial face that everyone’s gaze first turned. It’s true that on the actual political plane, at this point, the honorable Bottecchiari signified pretty well nothing (“A reformist à la Turati!” people on the Communist side had begun to call him). But compared to the old lion, what an insipid figure the other members of the ex-directory of the final underground Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale cut! Apart from Dr. Herzen, the so-called prefect of the Liberation, recently emigrated to Palestine, no one else was missing. There was the lawyer Galassi-Tarabini of the Democratic Christian Party, who, worried to find himself there at a purely secular, civic funeral—and for this reason he swivelled every which way his washed-out blue eyes that seemed always about to fill with tears—walked beside Don Bedogni, of the Catholic Action Party, who, on the contrary, in a French beret and baggy trousers, even in these circumstances made an effort to display the consummate ease, the unprejudiced, modern suavity which, in the post-war period, made him one of the most renowned public figures of the entire Emilia Romagna. There was the engineer Sears, of the Partito d’Azione,^§ who, as usual, walked a little apart from the others with his small hands clasped behind his back, and was smiling slightly to himself. There was the little group of Repubblicani-storici—the chemist Riccoboni, the tailor Squarcia, the dentist Canella—rather embarrassed, you could clearly see, but still willing to keep up with the times. And finally there was Alfio Mori, the federal Communist of Ferrara: small, dark, bespectacled, with the hint of a smile that revealed his big white upper canines, he advanced in quiet conversation with Nino Bottecchiari, the young, promising provincial secretary of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia.^¶ And yet, walking stooped and meek, reduced in appearance to a little band of nobodies, over all of them the honorable Bottecchiari enjoyed the easiest of victories. Seeing him looming over them by a head and continuously turning about that same red, ireful face—before which even Sciagura, the notorious Sciagura,^# sent to attack him on the crowded Corso Giovecca in the remote year of 1922, had been forced to beat an ignominious retreat—there was no doubt that he, the lawyer, the honorable Mauro Bottecchiari, was back again, if only for a day, the indisputable, acknowledged leader of Ferrara’s anti-Fascists. So nothing could be more natural, after the carriage had stopped beside the grave, and the arzdóre of the Po delta had slid out from it the zinc coffin of Clelia Trotti, than that it should be he, the honorable Bottecchiari, who should be the first to move toward the catafalque. The solemn transferral of the remains of Clelia Trotti, who had died three years before in the prison of Codigoro, during the German occupation, from the Codigoro graveyard to the Communal Cemetery of Ferrara, could not possibly have exempted him from the role of absolute eminence that was his due. It was his responsibility as Clelia Trotti’s oldest comrade in the Socialist struggle to open the series of commemorative speeches.

“Comrades!” shouted the honorable Bottecchiari—a raucous, imperious cry which echoed far along under the cemetery’s porticoes.

“Comrades,” he added in a lower tone, after a pause, as if he were preparing to go full tilt.

He then began to speak, gesticulating. And his words would most certainly have reached the furthest corners of Piazza della Certosa—the face of the honorable gentleman had at once become purple with the effort—if at that very moment a motor scooter in Via Borso hadn’t revved up explosively: a Vespa, one of the first to be seen coursing about the city just after the end of the war. The silencer on the Vespa’s exhaust pipe was missing. Missing? More than that, the showy chrome metal contraption which stuck out below, on the left-hand side of the scooter, served the opposite purpose: not to suppress the motor’s chugging revs but to make them drier and more obstreperous, better suited to the restless adolescent hand that twitched continuously to unleash them.

Interrupted in his oratorical flourish, the honorable Bottecchiari became silent. Contracting his white, bushy eyebrows, he directed his gaze toward the end of the square. He was short-sighted and, not seeing clearly, with a nervous gesture of his big hand that always trembled, took out a tiny pince-nez. The distant image of a young girl on a Vespa—who, having left Via Borsa but now slowing down, was riding along the portico arches of the cemetery behind the mass of persons in a semicircle—soon came into focus. Oh, it must be a very young girl, from a good family, the honorable Bottecchiari said, twisting his lips in a grimace of sadness. Who could she be, whose child? he added, with a reticent but irritated expression, as if he were going over in his mind all the names of the most well-off families of the city’s bourgeoisie, among whom the Bottecchiaris were also numbered, as if surveying one by one all those sturdy, tanned, teenage legs which at least two months of swimming at Rimini, Riccione and so on, had pared down—oh yes, the bourgeoisie, after the storm of the war has passed, quickly resume all their old habits! “What a lack of decency!” he preached at them, loudly: with the bitterness of one who feels wounded, misunderstood. “I wonder,” he added, pointing with outstretched hand at the very young scooterist, upright in her saddle down there, the slight, almost masculine torso clad in a black silk shirt and with a red ribbon in her hair, “I wonder if one can be much more disrespectful than that!” And the crowd, hundreds of scandalized faces, turned all together to make a hushing hiss.

“Ssh!”

The girl didn’t understand, or else didn’t care to. Although she had by now reached that part of the square she was heading for—the honorable Bottecchiari, who had seen her disappear behind a high barrier of people hoisted up on to the curb-posts around the churchyard the better to witness the ceremony, had waited in vain for her to reappear into the open further on—she not only didn’t feel inclined to turn off the engine, but instead, unabashed, every now and then kept up her game of sudden, clamorous revvings.

“For God’s sake, get her to stop!” cried the honorable Bottecchiari in exasperation.

“Ssh!” repeated an energetic chorus of the men who had climbed on to the curb-posts: necks that turned, eyes that from above could admonishingly survey a scene that he, Bottecchiari, even on tiptoe, was completely unable to observe. And yet, in the meantime, no one who wanted to put an end to that scandal was prepared to get down, and thereby risk losing their place!

Seated on the stone border of the churchyard, in a good spot to see everything—the honorable Bottecchiari over there, waiting to be able to resume his eulogy, and here, two or three meters away from him, the girl on the Vespa whose blue eyes just in that moment caught his own—Bruno Lattes gave a start.

He felt uneasy (what follows in this story will explain why) and lowered his head. When, after a few seconds he raised it again, the girl was already looking elsewhere. She was now staring, in a clearly ironic way, at a boy more or less her own age, as ashen-blond as herself and with the same hard, indifferent look in his bright blue irises. A tennis racket between his legs, and a white pullover tied by its sleeves around his neck, the boy was just in front of her, likewise seated on the churchyard border. The two, it was clear to Bruno Lattes, were going out together—and for that reason had arranged to meet here—in Piazza della Certosa, of course! But who was she, who were her parents? Bruno kept thinking, suddenly, spasmodically attracted to her, to the red ribbon that tied up the girl’s hair. Was it possible that the war, the years in which he had been a boy and she a child, had left not the tiniest trace on her? Was it possible that everywhere in Italy the adolescents were like this, as if, unaware of anything, they had been born teenagers from out of the pages of an illustrated American magazine?

“I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour,” said the young tennis player, without giving any sign of meaning to get up.

“And you’re complaining!” replied the girl.

She nodded, with a little sneer at the square teeming with people.

“Looks to me like you’ve found something to keep you happy.”

“Ssh! Be quiet!” repeated for the third time the men perched on the posts.

The boy assumed the hard look of a gangster from the movies. With a grin he pointed at the scooter.

“Why not give that little twitchy hand of yours a rest?”

“I’d prefer to go somewhere else,” the girl grumbled, though, in the meantime having got down from the saddle and switched off the motor, she had sat down beside her friend. “So what do you want to do? Stick around here?”

“Before this coffin that carries the mortal remains of Clelia Trotti, of our unforgettable Clelia,” the honorable Bottecchiari had resumed in a tone of voice which foreshadowed the big tears which would soon begin to roll down his apoplectic cheeks, “comrades, friends, fellow citizens all, I cannot but immediately recall the past we have lived through together. If I’m not mistaken, we came to know each other, Clelia Trotti, and I who address you, in the April of 1904 . . .”

Bruno Lattes slowly turned to look in the direction of the speaker. But once again he gave a start. The little man, dressed all in black, straight as a ramrod, who stood down there at the side of the honorable Bottecchiari—didn’t he know him? Could he be Cesare Rovigatti, the shoemaker of Piazza Santa Maria in Vado?

How little time has passed, he thought to himself with regret, since he, after July 25, 1943, had left Ferrara in August for Rome, and then no more than a year after, for the United States of America! And yet how much had happened in such a short time!

At the start of those last, atrocious three years, his parents, who never believed they would have to flee, never saw the need to provide themselves with false papers, were taken away by the Germans, and both their names now figured among the nearly two hundred others on the memorial tablet which the Jewish community had had fixed on the facade of the Temple in Via Mazzini. And he? He, on the contrary, had escaped from Ferrara. He got away at the right moment not to suffer the same fate as his mother and father, or alternatively not to have been shot by firing squad in the following December at the time of the Salò Republic, with the reward, apart from having saved his skin, of being by now on his way toward a tranquil, dignified university career: he was so far only a lecturer in Italian, rather than having tenure, but soon he’d be given a permanent post, which would result (after some months of waiting) in his acquiring the longed-for American citizenship . . .

In short, the last three years seemed like a lifetime. And yet Rovigatti, thank God—Bruno Lattes continued thinking and, without being aware, nodded his head in the affirmative—didn’t seem to have aged at all; even his grizzled black hair had remained more or less the same. Likewise the honorable Bottecchiari and all the other Ferrarese anti-Fascists, today assembled in an official plenary for the funeral of Clelia Trotti, whom he had known personally and spent time with from 1939 on. None of them seemed to have aged, nor had Ferrara itself, which, apart from the wreckage caused by the war, which was being speedily repaired, had seemed to him from the first identical to the city of his childhood and adolescence. Although stripped of all its furnishings, even the house he had been born and brought up in had been restored to him intact, intact like an empty shell . . . Likewise for Rovigatti—perhaps especially for him!—it seemed as though time had passed in vain, or even come to a halt.

There it all was, preserved in Piazza della Certosa, he concluded—the little, old provincial world he’d left behind. Almost like a wax replica: there it all was, exactly the same as itself. But Clelia Trotti?

The last time he’d met her had coincidentally been here, in Piazza della Certosa, nearly in the same spot where her coffin now rested, the day before his departure. In his memory, during the following interminable forty months, Clelia had never changed.

How he would have liked, now, to have found her, too, fixed in wax, motionless like a grotesque statuette that, torn between scorn and compassion, he could position as he pleased! With a smile, he would have told her: “See, wasn’t I telling the truth when I promised I’d return? And you were wrong not to believe me.”

If only she hadn’t changed, had remained forever the same as he had seen her that last afternoon before he went away, before he cut the cord and saved himself. He would have asked this of her, if, in the meantime, she hadn’t died.

2.

IN THE late autumn of 1939, almost a year after the proclamation of the Racial Laws, when he decided to go in search of Clelia Trotti, Bruno Lattes still knew almost nothing about her. From what he had heard, she was a small, withered woman, nearly sixty, who didn’t take care of herself, with the look of a nun, who, if you passed her on the street, you wouldn’t even notice. On the other hand, who in Ferrara at that time could claim to know her personally, or even remember that she existed? Even the honorable Bottecchiari, despite having acted a bit in his youth, and at the beginning of his political career having directed with her the legendary Torch of the People—they’d even been lovers, according to the whispered gossip, at least until the First World War broke out—even he, at the outset, gave the impression of having completely lost touch with her.

“Here he is, our young Lattes!” the honorable Bottecchiari had cried out from behind the imposing, Renaissance-style table that served him as a desk on the occasion that Bruno had gone to his office hoping to glean some information about the old school mistress. “Do come in! Come in!” he had added heartily, seeing him hesitating at the doorway. “How’s your father?”

While saying so, he extended his powerful right hand by way of greeting and encouragement, half-rising from his comfy lawyer’s seat upholstered in red satin while looking him up and down with a satisfied expression. And yet, as soon as he heard the name of Trotti, he was ready to withdraw into a state of cautious reticence.

“But yes . . . just a moment . . .” he replied, with obvious embarrassment, “someone, I can’t remember who, must have told me that she’s living . . . that’s she’s gone to stay in the Saraceno district . . . in Via Belfiore . . .”

He then changed the subject to speak of other things: about the war, the Phoney War, the likelihood of Italy’s entering the war, or rather “of Mussolini” doing so, and about Hitler’s next possible “strikes.” “Oh yes,” could be read in his blue eyes, full of little red veins and lit with triumphant irony, “oh yes! For twenty years you’ve looked at me with suspicion, even you people have avoided and despised me as an anti-Fascist, as a subversive, an enemy to the regime, and now that your lovely regime is chucking you out, here you are, all penitent, with your ears flat and your tail between your legs!”

He spoke of all kinds of other things, while never straying far from matters of international politics and that kind of commentary about things military which, by this stage, when the radio transmitted the daily news of the war halted at the Maginot Line, overflowed even at the Caffè della Borsa. At least on that occasion, Bruno thought, it was clear he didn’t want the conversation to stray from such territory. His tone of bland complicity shouldn’t mislead anyone who listened to think otherwise. As justification for this, the friendship that he, Bottecchiari, had always had with Bruno’s father, also a lawyer, since their long-ago schooldays—rather than friendship it might be better to call it professional consideration between middle-class and well-off colleagues—this tacit understanding had been maintained between the two of them, even after the March on Rome, even after the assassination of Matteotti, by the solemn and confidential greetings they would smilingly exchange in the Corso Giovecca from the distance of one sidewalk to the other . . . So much so that, later, at the end of their “pleasant pow-wow,” as the honorable gentleman had put it, it was a big surprise for Bruno that it was he, Bottecchiari, who, unprompted, just as they were saying their goodbyes, should have returned to the topic of Clelia Trotti.

“If you manage to track her down, do send her my greetings,” he said with a cordial grin, patting Bruno on the back just as he was halfway to the door.

And then, in a lower tone:

“You don’t know Rovigatti, do you—Cesare Rovigatti, the shoemaker who has his workshop in Piazza Santa Maria in Vado, beside the church?”

“We always go to him to get our shoes resoled!” The words escaped Bruno and he felt himself blushing. “Why do you ask?”

“He’s someone who’ll be able to tell you where Signora Trotti is,” explained the honorable gentleman. “Go and find him. Ask him. But be careful—” he added (the crack of the frosted-glass door had closed so it was now merely a spyhole)—“be very careful as she’s under surveillance!”

When he was downstairs, hovering at the main entrance, the first thing Bruno did was look up at the faintly lit square face of the clock in the square. It was seven o’clock. Why not go at once to see Rovigatti? If he hurried, he could easily find him still there in his dark little den. He was the kind of person who never closed before eight, eight-thirty.

He waited for the most opportune moment to slip away without drawing any attention to himself. He finally stepped out, and having hurried across the open space in front, as always teeming with people at that hour, he took cover under the Duomo’s arches.

He began to walk more slowly now, his hands deep in his raincoat pockets, and at the same time he pondered the ambiguous welcome he’d received from Bottecchiari.

Once again he saw his face as it had last appeared through the half-closed door. He had said “Rovigatti” and given a wink as he spoke. So, what had he meant, the honorable Bottecchiari, with that meaningful wink? Had he wanted, with that rather vulgar sign and the whispered name, to excuse himself indirectly for having kept their whole conversation a bit on the general side? Or alternatively, had he wanted to hint at the bond that had tied him, and perhaps, who knows, still secretly did, to his old Party comrade, a hint which, it’s clear, would take away, even from the little that had been said, any political import? In fact this was consistent with the way he usually behaved in Ferrara, when half boastfully, half ashamed of himself, he would confide man to man (but above all to other middle-class persons!) of a relationship he was having with a working-class girl. Exactly in that manner, and from time immemorial. And yet, on the other hand, wasn’t it quite odd that the honorable Bottecchiari, an ex-deputy of the Socialist Party, a veteran anti-Fascist, one who gave the impression of never having kowtowed to anyone, should be prepared to adopt—it didn’t matter whether for a joke or flirtatiously—the same stupid and cruel sulkiness of the conformist herd which arrogantly occupied the streets, the cafes, the cinemas, the dance halls, the sports grounds, the barbers’ shops, even the brothels, excluding from the Imperium whoever was or seemed different? The truth was that not even the honorable Bottecchiari had escaped without being harmed, without his character, the fierce integrity of his youth, being tainted by the pressure of those decades, from 1915 to ’39, which had seen in Ferrara, as everywhere else in Italy, the progressive degeneration of every human value. It’s true, his fellow lawyers, all of them Fascist in the extreme, literally foamed with anger every time, holding forth in the courthouse, he made it clear what he thought—more than one, without doubt, would have liked to hurl him to the ground, grab him by the folds of his toga, and yell in his face, “You’re trying to insinuate such and such, eh? Admit it!” But in reality they’d always let him hold forth, content in the end to have given the old battler free rein once more to indulge his eternal saying-without-saying, his never-ending, tireless hinting, which over the years had become a kind of tic, an addiction, almost the expression of a second nature. If the honorable Bottecchiari, regardless of his past, was always prepared, when leaving his office or the court on his way home every day, to walk down Corso Giovecca defiantly flaunting his mane of almost luminously white hair in the face of his few friends and many enemies, none of this had happened without him too, at some level, having at least partly forgiven us.

Rapt in these thoughts that held his heart in the grip of anxiety, jostling and being jostled by passers-by, Bruno slowly ascended Via Mazzini and Via Saraceno. “How disgusting!” he hissed every now and then between his teeth. He looked with hatred at the sparkling shop windows, the people stopped in front of them to look at the goods on display, the shopkeepers that showed themselves in their doorways, more or less the same in their behavior, he thought to himself, as the shrews who kept watch, always half in, half out of their huddled little houses in Via Colomba, Via Sacca and thereabouts. Still ensnared and enslaved by the passion which, since the August of that year, had tied him to one of the most brilliant and sought-after girls in Ferrara, Adriana Trentini, the women that passed him going the other way and brushed against him without noticing him (the beautiful, the blonde and the elegant especially) seemed to him in their whole way of being at once adorable and detestable, to carry the ill-disguised mark of depravity. “What trash! What shameful scum!” he kept repeating, not even under his breath.

And yet, gradually as he proceeded, and the streets became narrower and less well-lit, his fury and disgust began to abate. Taking a left turn into Via Borgo di Sotto, he came out almost level with Via Belfiore and was about to cross. But from the closed blinds of the houses in Via Belfiore, at least as far as where the little street made a sharp bend, only a sparse, yellowish light filtered out. Who could he ask, whose doorbell could he ring? By now everyone would be eating supper—at his own home as well, they’d be expecting him. Remembering Rovigatti, he ended up going on.

Obscured by fog, the Piazza Santa Maria in Vado suddenly cleared before him, revealing the sombre facade of the church on one side, the dark opening of Via Scandiana in front, in the center the little fountain where a group of women were seated chattering, shabby little workshops and hovels all around, from which emanated, together with a faint light and smells of roast beef and chestnut cake, vague and various sounds: an anvil beaten weakly, a child’s muffled sobbing, a “goodnight” and a “goodbye” exchanged by two elderly men from deep under an invisible portico, a clinking of glasses . . . His gaze was quickly drawn to the left by a small, slightly better-lit window. Rovigatti was there, seated at his cobbler’s workbench. Beyond the steamed-up windowpane his familiar outline could be discerned. And as he made his way toward him, it was as though he stood still and the unchanged image of the shoemaker was coming toward him through the fog.

He went in, took off his hat, offered his hand to Rovigatti above the workbench, sat down in front of him and at once and without any difficulty obtained the full and exact address of the schoolmistress: 36, Via Fondo Banchetto, at the house of Codecà. Then they began to talk. So that evening, as well, when he returned home the supper had long been finished.

The very next day, he timidly rang the doorbell of 36, Via Fondo Banchetto. And certainly, if he had been invited in at once, if a fat woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a shy manner—“her sister” as Rovigatti had drily explained—hadn’t come to the door to tell him that the schoolmistress was not at home, if she, the same she, in a black satin smock and with the Fascist badge pinned to her breast, hadn’t reappeared the next day to tell him that the schoolmistress was giving lessons and therefore couldn’t receive any visitors, and the next day again, that she wasn’t well, and, yet another day, that she’d gone to Bologna and wouldn’t be back before next week, and so on week after week, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become, as he did in fact become, friends with Rovigatti. He had understood from the first moment that he would be kept waiting at Santa Maria in Vado. But for how long? he had wondered. Had Clelia Trotti come to know him through his attempts to contact her? Had her married sister Codecà told her that he came to the house almost every day?

Each time he pressed the bell his heart would be beating fast, and each time he felt the disappointment anew. Rejected, he would withdraw to Piazza Santa Maria in Vado, not three hundred meters away. He would never find Rovigatti’s glass door shut, on that he could rely. He only needed to push it open with two fingers, and there would always be the shoemaker in person, with his tuft of raven hair which still youthfully flopped over to one side of his pale forehead, stippled with blackheads around the temples, with his smile, with his dark, almost feverish eyes which gazed up at him. “Good evening, Signorino Bruno, how are you?” Rovigatti would say. “Do come in please and make yourself at home.” And did he not truly do so?

They would sometimes talk till after nine o’clock. In the meantime, seated on the bench facing him, Bruno would watch the shoemaker at work.

Rolling the pack thread in palms as tough as the leather he had cut out in the shape of a sole, Rovigatti drew the needle back and forth with a measured energy. He perennially kept a handful of tacks in his mouth, and his lips and tongue were wonders of precision and promptness in disgorging them one by one into the light as the occasion required. Gripping a shoe tightly between his knees, he hammered the tacks in tirelessly and automatically . . . How skilled and assured he was! Bruno thought. What strength and self-awareness he seems able to derive from manual labor! Making busy with his big, blackened, incredibly calloused hands didn’t seem in the least to impede his conversation. Rather the opposite. A tack hammered home through the thickness of leather with a single stroke seemed sometimes to serve his purposes better than any argument.

And yet what was it that still kept them apart? he often asked himself. What stopped him from winning the shoemaker’s full and absolute confidence? Class difference, perhaps? Could it really be that?

Speaking ill of Fascism to him—in the end really an expedient to win him over, but mainly to get him to intervene on his behalf so that Clelia Trotti’s realm might open up to him a bit earlier than had been decreed—it sometimes happened that the shoemaker only listened, or replied coldly, in an exaggeratedly objective tone.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” he went as far as replying one evening, having given a peep outside to check. “No, I wouldn’t say that. Even the Fascists have done some good.”

He was clearly relishing a victory. Not only because Signorino Bruno, the son of those well-off folk in Via Madama whose shoes he’d resoled for almost twenty years, had come to pay him visits, but also because a moment ago he had enjoyed the luxury of conceding some small merit to a common enemy. He wasn’t an upper-class gentleman, no, he seemed to be saying. He, Cesare Rovigatti, had been born and brought up among the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed. And so? Just because Cesare Rovigatti was only a shoemaker, did that now mean you could only expect from him obtuse rancor and blind, indiscriminate hatred? Ah no, that’s too easy! Those times were over when the rich and powerful could make use of the working classes as cannon fodder, reserving a monopoly on fine sentiments for themselves! Enough of these misunderstandings! If someone had fooled themselves into thinking they could start these old tricks again now, entrusting the working classes with the noble task of doing their dangerous work for them, well then so much the worse for that someone.

He seemed to much prefer other topics to politics. Literature, for example.

Did Bruno like Victor Hugo? he asked. What an unbeatable book, Ninety-Three! And Les Misérables? And The Man Who Laughs? And Toilers of the Sea? Although on a much lower level, only Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi in nineteenth-century Italy had managed to write a novel somewhat similar. And yet, all considered, what a disaster Italian literature was from the proletariat’s point of view, taking into account the level of education available to him in our country! Among the poets, who was there to look to except Dante, “the greatest poet in the world”? Those who came after had always written for the upper classes and not for the people. Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Alfieri—oh yes, even Alfieri!—Foscolo: all of them fashioning stuff for the élite. As for The Betrothed—too much odor of incense, of the reactionary! No, if you wanted to read something worthy—modest, perhaps, but worthy—you had to leap forward to the Carducci of “The Love Song” or some of the social satires of Stecchetti. But on this subject, now, in the twentieth century, apart from “that degenerate D’Annunzio,” apart from Pascoli, how were things faring in the world of literature? He, unfortunately, hadn’t the time to keep up. Closing at seven, the city library didn’t allow any worker in the evening to profit from that public service. But Signorino Bruno didn’t have the same constraints. Although, as a Jew, neither could he any longer frequent the city library, nevertheless he taught in the Jewish middle school in Via Vignatagliata and could consider himself a teacher. And so, educated as he was, and surely informed of all that’s new, did he, Signorino Bruno, believe that in Italy, today, there were still any good writers?

Suddenly gripped by a deep sense of futility, almost of impotence, Bruno kept silent.

“In that area, I’d be willing to bet,” Rovigatti concluded, shaking his head, “no one today’s doing anything good or useful!”

But what Rovigatti was most at ease talking about was his own craft.

His was a humble craft, he said, one of the humblest, even: about this no one could be more convinced than he was. But thanks to it, not only had he been able to make ends meet since he was a boy, but also it meant he’d never had to bow down to anyone through all the years of the dictatorship. And then did Signorino Bruno think that being a shoemaker didn’t provide him with interesting challenges? Any activity could provide those. You just need to exercise it with passion, succeed in winkling out its secrets.

He was speaking without the least bitterness at this point. And Bruno, listening to him, and bit by bit forgetting his own sadness, ended up feeling almost cheerful.

In his hands any misshapen and scuffed shoe always came alive. With infallible intuition, Rovigatti was able to reconstruct a character from the way a client had scuffed a toe, twisted an upper or worn down a heel.

“It’ll be hard getting this person to pay up,” he would say, for example, handling some shoes of the tightest patent leather, which seemed new and yet hid considerable signs of wear under their pointed toes. The caution with which he proffered them for Bruno’s inspection over the little workbench, for him to examine them with the interest they deserved, perfectly characterized their owner, who was Edelweiss Fegnagnani, no less, one of the most renowned “decadents” of the city.

“And you, blonde beauty, be careful where you run off to!” he murmured with a sympathetic grin, passing his calloused thumb around the extraordinarily high heel, sharp as a dagger, of a little crocodile-skin shoe which a brisk, exuberant, triumphant style of walking had thoroughly consumed at the edges.

One evening he even showed Bruno, among others, the shoes of the honorable Bottecchiari, “the prince of our forum,” as he put it, not without sarcasm.

“He has some flaws, you can see,” he added a moment later, his eyes burning with combative enthusiasm, with tenacious loyalty, “but he’s someone in whom, thank God, one can still have some faith. What does it matter if he’s become a bit bourgeois? He earns money, a great deal of it. He has a lovely house, a lovely wife . . . at least, lovely once, though fifty years will have taken a toll even on her . . . With his intelligence, his gifts as a speaker, even the Fascists respect him and court him. Last year they even wanted to give him a Party card. But you know what he said to them? He gave them a slap!”

Meanwhile his hands kept on turning over the honorable Bottecchiari’s footwear, a pair of brown leather shoes with square toes—the shoes of a hearty optimist, weighing more than a hundred kilos, at whose side he had marched in the ranks of the Italian Socialist Party of Giacomo Matteotti, of Filippo Turati and Anna Kuliscioff, and together with him, in 1924, had been attacked in the downstairs salon of the Railworkers Food Co-operative, both of them escaping by sheer miracle through a back door.

He gestured with his chin in the direction of Via Fondo Banchetto.

Neither he nor the other friends from the old days, he continued, still met up with the honorable Bottecchiari, hadn’t done so for almost twenty years, that was true. And yet, less than a week ago, seeing him passing the other way along the opposite sidewalk of the Corso Giovecca (the other side of the barricade! Bruno thought, suddenly swept up in a fellow feeling that bound him to Rovigatti, to Clelia Trotti, and to all the betrayed and forgotten poor of the city and of the country he imagined behind them, happy and grateful to be with them, now and forever . . .), less than a week ago, Rovigatti was saying, the honorable Bottecchiari, jovial and easy-going as ever, had shouted out, waving an arm above his head: “Ciao, Rovigatti!”

3.

ONE FINE day the door of the house in Via Fondo Banchetto opened without the usual stout figure of Signora Codecà appearing at the threshold. It had to happen. In any decent fairy tale (it could have been three-thirty in the afternoon: there was indeed something unreal about the silence of that utterly deserted district), it’s rare that things don’t come to an end with the disappearance or transformation of the Monster. At a stroke the spell was broken: Signora Codecà had vanished into thin air. And, well, who but Clelia Trotti could that person be who had opened the door in her stead? It must surely be her, Bruno told himself. It could only be her, the withered, neglected little woman, a kind of nun, as people had described her! To convince himself, all he needed to do was look her in the eyes. They were still the striking eyes of the free, passionate girl who had modelled herself on Anna Kuliscioff, of the impetuous working-class heroine that the honorable Bottecchiari had loved in his youth . . .

Having shed her dragon skin, and resumed her true features, Clelia Trotti, now, like the princess in a fairy tale, smiled sweetly at the young man who stood on the cobblestones outside her door, at his air of surprise and perplexity. At this point a “Come in—I know why you’re here,” would have been enough, and, as the little door closed behind them, shutting out the cottonwool-like hush of Via Fondo Banchetto, the fairy tale would have achieved its perfectly correct ending. But no, that welcome was not forthcoming. That sweet smile, somewhat disavowed by the clear expression in her sky-blue eyes, was merely questioning. It seemed to say “Who are you? And what do you want?” So much so that, at least this time, Bruno had little difficulty in understanding. It was clear, he thought. His name up till now had never been mentioned to Clelia Trotti, neither by Signora Codecà nor even by Rovigatti. It was necessary, then, across the threshold still denied to him, to declare his name and surname: “Bruno” and “Lattes,” syllable by syllable. This, in any case, was enough for the puzzlement that covered Trotti’s face—sincere puzzlement and a trusting abandon, while her pale eyes seemed washed in a wave of generous compassion—to give way to a clearer, more realistic perspective on the situation.

“Take care as she is under surveillance!” the honorable Bottecchiari had said, lowering his voice to a whisper. He was referring to the police, the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo.^** But yet again, when considered more closely, things turned out to be different from what they seemed.

“Let’s go and talk in the dining room,” murmured the old schoolteacher once she had ushered Bruno into the hallway and shut the door.

She preceded him on tiptoe down a dark, narrow, damp corridor. Following her in the same manner, trying not to make any noise and at the same time watching her move with all the stealth she could muster, he found it easy to guess why. Clelia Trotti was under surveillance mainly at home. Signora Codecà and her husband (the former a full-time elementary-school teacher, the latter cashier for the Agricola Bank, the stronghold of the city’s landowning middle class) were Clelia Trotti’s true jailors. And OVRA? OVRA knew perfectly well what it was doing. Assigning the “cautioned” sixty-year-old to the domestic control of this worthy couple, persons clearly possessing too much good sense to put up with their unwelcome guest of a relative receiving suspect visitors, the organization merely needed to appear every now and then. In the meantime, it could, very tranquilly, doze off.

They entered the small, ground-floor dining room. Bruno looked around. So it was here, he said to himself, that Clelia Trotti spent most of her days, talking herself hoarse giving lessons to the infants and children of the neighborhood! So this was her prison!

The furniture in pale wood was cheap, but not without ridiculous pretensions. The faded green woolen cloth, stained with ink, which covered the table in the center, the Murano-style glass chandelier suspended from the ceiling, the accountant’s diploma inscribed to the head of the house, Evaristo Codecà, in ruled lines and in florid gothic script, that hung in its glory among wretched pictures of seascapes and mountain landscapes, the huge dark shape of a grandfather clock in the corner, with a dry, resonant, menacing tick-tock, even the ray of sunlight which—from the solitary window, the custodian of a little huddle of potted plants—penetrated the room, revealing on the opposite side in the center of a small, bare wickerwork sofa, a horse’s head painted in oils on the hempen cover of a fat cushion; and there, at last, on the other side of the table, smiling, it was true, but with an apologetic look, as if asking for a bit of indulgence, sat the old revolutionary who had seen Anna Kuliscioff and Andrea Costa with her own eyes, who had argued about Socialism with Filippo Turati, who played a by-no-means-secondary part in the famous Red Week of the Romagna in 1914, now reduced to speaking in muffled tones, raising her eyes now and then to the ceiling to signal that her sister or brother-in-law might at any moment come down from upstairs to surprise and interrupt them. Or else she remained silent, with her open hand half-raised and the forefinger of her other hand at her lips (the pendulum clock chimed hoarsely during one of these silences, and at the same time a low clucking of hens could be heard from the garden), like a schoolgirl scared of being caught out . . . In that place like the depths of a well, in that sort of vulnerable den, everything spoke to Bruno of boredom, of apathy, of long years of stingy, inglorious segregation and oblivion. He couldn’t, at a certain point, avoid asking himself, Was it then really worth the trouble to struggle through life in a way so different from how, for example, the honorable Bottecchiari had behaved, if time, which weakens and overturns everything, had extended its fell, corrupting hand on all alike? Clelia Trotti had never bowed her neck, had always preserved her soul in all its purity. On the contrary, the honorable Bottecchiari, although he never accepted the Fascist Party card, had fully involved himself in society in his maturer years. Without anyone complaining about or being scandalized by it, he had blithely become part of the administrative council of the Agricola Bank. So, considering the outcome, which of the two had made the right choices in life? And what had he come for, involving himself so late in the day, if not precisely for that: to realize that the better world, the just and decent society of which Clelia Trotti represented the living proof and the relic, would never return? He watched her, the pathetic, persecuted anti-Fascist, the pitiful prisoner, and was unable to detach his eyes from the dark furrow, clearly visible, which, just under her white hair gathered in a bun at her nape, ran all around her thin wrinkled neck.

What kind of help, he thought, continuing to stare at that poor, ill-washed neck, could he expect from Clelia Trotti, from Rovigatti, and from that humble circle of their friends of whose existence no one could even be sure? For goodness’ sake! To extract himself from that grotesque conversation he would have to get up and go from there as soon as possible, and perhaps from that point on to listen a bit more attentively to what his father never tired of advising him. That might be a good idea. Why not just for once pay attention to what his father said? Since last September, his father had lost no opportunity to tell him to take himself off to Eretz, as he was in the habit of saying, or to the United States, or South America. He was still young, his father would insistently say, his whole life was before him. He should emigrate, put down roots abroad. There was still a chance. Italy would certainly not enter the war before the following summer. And no one would refuse him entry, carrying the passport of a persecuted Jew. . . .

“Be patient, I beg you,” Clelia Trotti whispered in the meantime, “but in this house I’m merely a guest. My sister and brother-in-law—” she added, her blue eyes staring into Bruno’s, showing once more the joy of confiding, the certainty of not being mistaken in having trusted him—“my sister and brother-in-law, since I returned from internal exile, and so for quite a few years, have taken me in, and have no other thought—” here she shook her head and laughed—“but to stop me committing any further folly.”

She twisted her lips.

“They keep me under surveillance—” her gaze suddenly serious, almost severe—“and poke their noses into everything I do, believe me it’s worse than being a baby. I understand. For people who don’t think as we do . . . who have a political viewpoint utterly different from ours . . . good people, you know, two hearts of gold . . . I understand that behaving the way they unfortunately do toward me might seem the right thing to do. They claim they do it for my own good. Perhaps so. But how annoying it is!”

“Is your sister the one who always comes to open the door?”

“Yes, it’s my sister, but why?” replied the schoolmistress in alarm. “Does that mean . . . ? Oh, you poor thing!” she exclaimed, joining her small bony hands together, her right hand’s index and middle fingers stained with nicotine. “Who knows how many times Giovanna has forced you to make the trip to no avail!”

“One day she’d say one thing, the next another. They were excuses, I could easily see. But I could only suppose you were aware of that. And now . . .”

“Oh, you poor thing!” repeated Clelia Trotti. “And there I was talking about what was right! No. Within certain limits I can understand it, but this is going much too far. They will hear from me.”

She remained silent for some seconds, as though meditating on the seriousness of the judgement that had been imposed on her and the measures she would have to take to assert her rights. And yet, at the same time, you could see she was thinking of something else. Something that, despite herself, gave her some pleasure.

“Listen. How did you come by my address? It can’t have been that easy for you to procure it, I imagine.”

“A couple of months ago, I had the idea of going to ask for it from the lawyer Bottecchiari,” Bruno replied, looking elsewhere.

And since Signora Trotti didn’t inquire any further, he added: “Bottecchiari is an old friend of the family. I was counting on him knowing where to direct me. But he didn’t know, or didn’t want to tell me, anything very clear. He advised me to call in on Cesare Rovigatti, you know, the shoemaker who has his workshop near here in Piazza Santa Maria in Vado. Luckily I knew him very well, and . . .”

“Our little Cesare, yes, indeed. Very dear to us. But I don’t understand how . . . He himself could easily have spoken to me about you! Don’t you see? For one reason or another there’s no one who doesn’t feel compelled to act in the oddest way toward me. And they don’t understand that, with this system, gradually making everything a desert around me, it’s as if they’re taking away the air I breathe. Better to be in prison, then!”

There was fatigue, disgust and deep bitterness in the tone with which she pronounced these words. Bruno looked her in the face. But her intensely blue eyes, steady and dry under her grey, knitted eyebrows, were full of hope, as though she doubted everything and everybody except him.

Suddenly the door opened. Someone looked in. It was Signora Codecà.

“Who’s there?” had asked the familiar, hateful voice before the salt-and-pepper head-of-hair poked in to investigate.

The diffident gaze of Signora Codecà fell on Bruno.

“Ah,” she said coldly, “I didn’t know you had a visitor.”

“But it’s a friend! It’s Signor Lattes . . .” Clelia Trotti hurried to explain, agitated. “Bruno Lattes!”

“Pleasure to meet you!” said Signora Codecà, without taking a step forward. “At last you’ve found her, eh?” she added in a sour tone in Bruno’s direction without actually looking at him.

She drew back a little.

From the dark of the corridor a little eight- or nine-year-old child came forward with a frightened look. Three white horizontal lines were drawn across the front of his black smock.

“Go on in,” Signora Codecà encouraged him.

And then, turning to her sister: “Don’t worry, I’ll accompany Signor Lattes out.”

When they had once again assumed their familiar positions, with her massive person blocking the door and Bruno looking up at her from the cobbled street, Signora Codecà spoke again.

“I’m not sure if my sister remembered to tell you, but after tomorrow at the latest, Clelia will really have to go away. On a trip, a rather long one. How long? I don’t know for sure, perhaps several weeks . . . perhaps several months . . . so for the moment it’s useless for you to pay any more visits. Try to understand. You’d be doing us a favor, Signor Lattes, if you’d be considerate about this. I’m saying this also for your own sake . . .”

She stressed these last words with a plaintive, pleading look. Then, as she drew back and slowly shut the door in Bruno’s face, she added in a whisper: “We’re under surveillance, you understand?”

That very night, returning home as usual, very late, and without even having phoned around eight o’clock to tell them not to expect him for supper—he’d spent the evening first at the cinema and then seated by the billiards table in a bar outside Porta Reno—Bruno was taken by surprise in the street by the snow.

To start with it was a sifting of tiny flakes milling lightly around the streetlamps. But shortly after, in Via Madama, as he tried to fit his key into the front door, the flakes had already become so thick and heavy that in no time his face was drenched.

He kept on fumbling with the key, and in doing so, as the castle clock had begun to toll the hours, he tried to count them. One, two, three, four. Four o’clock: very late indeed, but for all that he had little hope his father would have given up waiting and switched off the light—he would only turn it off after he heard him groping past his bedroom door on tiptoe, and his father would let him understand, by coughing and grumbling, that he had stayed awake and worried till that late hour. On the other hand, all the better. Perhaps this night he could be exempted from the tired, stupid saga of tiptoeing along the dark corridor. If his father was still not asleep, fine. He would turn the main light on and resolutely enter his bedroom. He already knew what his father would speak to him about.

And yet, when he found himself in the large entrance hall, at the end of which, across the dividing wall, he could see the dark garden plants, he became aware of a faint light filtering round the door of the ground-floor room that served him as a study. He drew close. Slowly, he opened the door. His father was there, seated in the armchair next to the table. Wrapped in a woolen blanket, he slept with his head inclined against his shoulder.

He stepped noiselessly into the room, and leaned against the wall beside the door.

He’d never come home, he reflected, as late as this. That was perhaps why at a certain point his father had decided to get up from bed and go downstairs, like this, in his nightshirt and slippers. Who could say? It might have been that he’d thought to take the opportunity of a thorough discussion with him about emigrating to Palestine or America, a topic which every time his father had broached it, he’d responded to coldly or even rudely. If he waited for him down in the study, his father had perhaps told himself, the two of them would be able to talk, or even quarrel, for as long as they wanted. Their voices wouldn’t have woken anyone.

He moved on tiptoe, grimacing. And he was about to touch the sleeper’s left hand, resting as though dead over the Il Resto di Carlino,^†† the newspaper open and unfolded over his knees—his right hand, on which his forehead was resting, was instinctively placed to shield his half-closed eyelids from the light of the table lamp—when a sudden pang of sorrow interrupted his gesture midway.

He retracted his arm and took a step backward.

But instead of turning and leaving, he halted to look at his father’s scrawny, frail temples, more cartilage than bone, and his white, feathery, weightless hair, in its lightness and whiteness so similar to Clelia Trotti’s. How many more years would his father live? And Clelia Trotti? Would the two of them live long enough to witness the conclusion of the tragedy that was convulsing the world?

Although finished and near to death, both of them in the end were still dreaming their dreams. From her prison in Via Fondo Banchetto, Clelia Trotti was dreaming that the rebirth of Italian socialism would occur thanks to the infusion of youthful blood into the Party’s old, decrepit veins. From the Ghetto of Via Madama, where with morose delectation he had holed up—the beloved, irreplaceable Merchants’ Club had naturally expelled him, so now he stayed at home reading the newspapers and listening to Radio London—the lawyer Lattes dreamed of the “brilliant career” which was bound to await his little son in America or in Eretz. But he, Bruno, the little son, what would he do? Stay or go? His Papa was mistaken about the power of discrimination: the police headquarters would never issue him with a passport. And since the war, now only just begun, would last who knows how long, since the trap now sprung had rendered any escape impossible, since the only road now was obviously the one that would lead everyone, without exclusion, toward a future without hope, it was better to join in voluntarily, if only for compassion and humility, in the desperate hobbies, the wretched, miserable delusions of onanistic prisoners that were shared by his fellow travelers.

Still on tiptoe, he went toward the window.

After having half-closed one of the two shutters, he looked out through the steamed-up panes between the slats. The snow continued to fall. After some hours it would be piled high, would have extended its oppressive hush over the whole city, a prison and a ghetto for everyone.

4.

IN THE end, Signora Codecà had her way. She asked that her house should not become a den of conspirators. And, finally, she had revealed herself, had thrown her hand down on the table, all the cards of an undoubtedly zealous jailor, and yet not treacherous, only fearful.

Whatever she said or thought, in all probability OVRA had completely forgotten about 36, Via Fondo Banchetto. For a long time, no policeman had shown up at dusk to check whether the “cautioned” Trotti, Clelia, was to be found at her prescribed and proper domicile. Yet it was better not to contradict Signora Codecà. Better to let her play the role of a strict and incorruptible spy which she herself had assumed. Never to lose sight of her subversive sister, who, after her spell of internal exile, had been sentenced to ten supplementary years of enforced residence with a daily obligation to be indoors by dusk and to report every week at the police station to sign in the special register of the “cautioned”; to rush to the door at every loud ring, without ever forgetting to wear the Fascist badge in full view on top of the black smock of a teacher in regular employment—even Signora Codecà had the right to a small raft of illusions, an element of play, necessary to anyone who wants to survive! And Clelia Trotti? Did she truly want to be visited? To leave the house with a furtive air, peep out through the upstairs shutters, to rapidly turn the corner into Via Coperta—if there was something that gave her pleasure, surely it must be this? Sooner or later it would be she herself who would make an appearance.

One morning, about two months later, while he was teaching in a classroom of the Jewish School in Via Vignatagliata, Bruno saw the janitoress’ head peeping gingerly round the door.

“May I?”

“What is it?”

“There’s a lady outside who wants to see you.”

Scuffing her slippers on the brickwork floor and prompting the usual hum of mirth, the janitoress came toward the teacher’s desk.

“What should I tell her?” she asked worriedly.

Of an indeterminable age, short, round, with two oily, shining strips of raven hair which descended from the top of her head to frame a sleepy-looking, sheepish face, she was one of the least ancient of those recruited from the hospice for the old in Via Vittoria by the engineer Cohen when, in October 1938, it was necessary to find space on the second floor of the kindergarten for the older children expelled from the state middle schools.

“Tell her to wait for the bell to go off,” Bruno replied, so irritably that the pupils suddenly went quiet. “How many times must I tell you not to disturb me during lessons?”

It was Clelia Trotti, it had to be her.

Continuing to explain things to the pupils and to ask them questions, in his mind’s eye he saw her waiting in the adjoining vestibule. She was reading the big tablets full of the names of benefactors affixed to the walls between the washed-out doors of the classrooms; she was contemplating, one by one, the varnished clay busts of Victor Emmanuel II, of Umberto I and of Victor Emmanuel III, placed in the niches of the wall around the Victory Dispatch.^‡‡ Every now and then she went to look out of the two big windows opposite, both of them thrown open wide . . .

At last, the bell rang. Pouring out of the classrooms into the hallway, the children rushed headlong down the big central staircase. When Bruno, too, had gone out into the now deserted hallway, spotting the little woman in hat and grey suit down there, standing still, with her back to him looking at Diaz’s proclamation, for some moments he was disconcerted. He was hoping that, hearing his steps, she would turn round with a start, and smile at him with that kind smile of hers, as though close to tears, to look him in the face with her blue eyes flashing the same ironic, sad and generous expression they had when he had first told her his name. Only then would he truly recognize her.

“It’s been many years since I read the Dispatch of the 4th of November 1918!” said Clelia Trotti, even before she shook his hand, signaling with her chin toward the tablet. “I needed to come all the way here to do that!”

They faced each other by the big window that overlooked the inner courtyard garden, with its stricken little trees in the spring sunlight crowded with chirping sparrows, and they rested their elbows on the iron rail.

“What a lovely time of the year, isn’t it?” the schoolmistress said, looking out toward the red vista of roofs that opened before them, beyond the garden walls.

“It is indeed.”

He observed her from the corner of his eye. She had taken care to spruce herself up, and applied powder as far down as her neck.

“You feel yourself coming alive again,” she continued, half-closing her eyes against the glare.

And then, after a pause, but still with a sense of inner joy: “How right we were though, we Socialists—to tell the truth, it wasn’t just a few of us, at that stage, who thought otherwise—to hear our death knell in the bells rung for the Italian victory of 1918! ‘The valleys, they had invaded, with confidence and pride . . .’ Already concealed within those words is the Fascist movement, the arrogant rhetoric of these last twenty years.”

Suddenly, emerging out of the stagnant depths of his own bitterness, Bruno felt a violent impulse to hurt her, to do harm to her.

“Why fool yourself?” he interrupted. “Why maintain the deception? As you know, in Ferrara all of us Jews, or nearly all of us, were nothing other than bourgeoisie—I say were, since now, perhaps all for the better, we no longer belong to any class, we make up a social group apart, as in medieval times. We were nearly all of us retail traders or wholesale merchants, professionals of various stripes, landowners, and therefore, as you have taught me, nearly all Fascists. Of necessity. You have no idea how many of us even today have remained fervent patriots!”

“You mean nationalists?” Clelia Trotti gently corrected him.

“Call them what you like. My father, for example, went to fight on the Carso as a volunteer. In 1919, returning from the front, he chanced on a march of workers, who, seeing him in officer’s uniform, literally covered him with spit. Today, obviously, he isn’t a Fascist any longer, despite the fact that it was actually his Fascist Party card of 1922 that earned us some exemptions. Now he only thinks about the Palestinian fatherland. And yet, I wouldn’t swear that General Diaz’s sentences, which continue to make such an impression on the imaginations of most of my—what should I call them?—my co-religionists, have entirely stopped having an impact on the imagination of those who share your political faith!”

“What you say seems to me very understandable,” Clelia Trotti calmly replied. “You explain it very well.”

She didn’t seem in the least disappointed, but perhaps, once again, somewhat saddened.

She sighed.

“The First World War has been a great disaster,” she said. “How many mistakes even we made! Nonetheless, you seem to me too pessimistic. Fair enough: in general terms, you’re right. Why not take yourself into account, though? You’re different, you’re not like the others, and your example is more than enough to show that every rule has its exception. And you’re young, you have your whole life before you. For the young like you who have grown up under Fascism, there is a great deal for you to do!”

Hearing Clelia Trotti using the very same phrases as his father, Bruno raised his head. He had again turned to look out of the window. The future she saw was down there, where the last houses in Ferrara, their roofs a dark rusty color, gave way in the direction of the sea to the blue-green of the endless countryside.

A few months later Fascist Italy also decided to enter the war.

“At last!” Clelia Trotti exclaimed, joyful and breathless, that very evening of June 10, as she entered the study in Via Madama.

“At last!” she repeated, as she dropped into the armchair.

She leaned her neck back on the green velvet headrest and closed her eyes. It wasn’t the first time that, making the most of the darkness and defying all prohibitions, she had come to visit Bruno. And yet the intensity of excitement which these clandestine visits gave her from the first showed no signs of diminishing.

When her breathing had returned to normal, she immediately said that Fascism, with that mad gesture of declaring war, had signed its own death warrant. She was sure of it, she affirmed, and began to explain with extraordinary heat and passion why she was so sure of her prediction.

Bruno stared at her in silence.

Her good faith was unquestionable, he thought, no one had the right to doubt it. And yet why not admit it? Wasn’t the look that shone in her eyes, above all, the certainty—now that leaving Italy had become truly impossible—that he would no longer be able to dodge the task that she had assigned him in her heart of hearts, nor slip out of her hands, as up until yesterday she had feared he might? Undoubtedly there was something of that. Even though, from the expression her mouth had already taken on, tender but at the same time skeptical, it was more than evident that she first of all—she who might be his mother!—would forbid any comparison to be made between the boy before her and Mauro Bottecchiari, the companion of her youth, whom Italy’s entry into the war in long-ago 1915 had offered the political pretext of his being rid of her.

In the early stages, their meetings in his downstairs study were on a fairly frequent basis. Everything was done lightly, of course, as a game, the kind of game prisoners might play, steeped in bitterness and in the absence of everyday consolations, and Bruno took some pleasure from it, even from that air of erotic subterfuge which inevitably hovered over their meetings—always occurring after supper; every now and then she would be late, and he would be reading a book or preparing a lesson while he waited—and especially from her light, complicit knock on the blinds outside, which would startle him.

As soon as she came in, Clelia Trotti would sit herself down in the armchair. But sometimes, without even taking off her grey cotton gloves—despite the heat that soaked her forehead with sweat, she would never take off her hat—she would at once get up again and go toward one of the four glass-fronted bookcases symmetrically disposed along the lower part of the study’s walls, and remain there with her nose against the glass. Her unwillingness to open the bookcase doors showed a kind of tact. She confined herself to peering through the glass and reading the titles of the books with the help of an eyeglass she would draw from her big black leather bag.

“Why not take some away with you?” Bruno, from behind a table heaped with papers, would encourage her. “I’d gladly loan you any of them.”

She shook her head. With all the lessons she had to give, she wouldn’t have time to read them.

“Besides, I’m so behind the times in all cultural matters,” she confided to him one evening, “that to get up to date would require an effort beyond me. For example, I’ve always wanted to read a book by Benedetto Croce;^§§ I’m not sure, maybe one of his less abstruse works, one of his historical studies. Year after year, I’ve put off doing so, a little because I imagine the fear it would cause my sister Giovanna, poor thing, should she find that sort of stuff in the house, and also a little because of reservations . . . to do with socialism. Decades have passed, and here we are, and it no longer seems worth the trouble. When I was a girl, I had a passion for philosophy. In those days it was all Comte, Spencer, Ardigò and Haeckel with his Monism.”

She smiled.

Then, with a tinge of shyness in her eyes: “You, though, are bound to know the works of Croce well, isn’t that so?”

It was a reference to what Bruno himself, though he immediately regretted it, had once been unable to stop himself from saying: that he wasn’t a Socialist and in all probability never would be.

Yet stronger than any grief, any regret that she was not at a level to be able to teach him anything, she was undoubtedly consoled by the belief that this itself was as it should be: that he wasn’t a Socialist, yes, but something other, something new. Socialists of the old school would not know how to confront the future, the years that were awaiting Italy and the world beyond the war that had just begun, years which would only be reached after having paid who knows what reckoning of blood and tears. “We lot are over the hill, a bunch of dinosaurs,” she used to say. It was as though she were attesting that tomorrow, in their stead, there would be a need for the young like him, Bruno, who would be Socialists without being such. Only thus would it be possible, when the moment arrived, for the Communists to be given a hard time, even though they were “giants,” for they too, especially in their “methods,” now belonged in the past.

Toward the end of September, OVRA unexpectedly reappeared on the scene.

One day, toward dusk, an agent of the political wing in plain clothes came to ask if Signora Trotti was “at her domicile.” Winded, Signora Codecà replied that she was at home. But the woman’s agitated state must have made the official suspicious, and he wouldn’t go away without having assured himself with his own eyes, albeit with a profusion of apologies, that everything was in order. One could no longer be sure. Fearing that this sudden awakening of the police signaled a harsher policy of control toward the “cautioned,” Clelia Trotti decided to renounce her nocturnal escapades for some time after. Bruno and she had to see each other in the daytime, as it were by chance, avoiding, naturally, any further visits to the study in Via Madama.

So every now and then, even if not with the same frequency as before, and arranging their appointments by way of Rovigatti—who, being jealously possessive of Trotti, was ill-disposed to help—they began to meet in Piazza della Certosa. From his perspective, Rovigatti wasn’t mistaken, Bruno could see that. What had they to say to each other or to do together, he and Clelia Trotti, that was worth the risk? It wasn’t as though the two of them saw each other, as Rovigatti insinuated, just to talk about Radio London or Colonel Stevens.^¶¶ Certainly not for that. But in the present, tense situation, was it really worth provoking the police?

He tried to pass on the shoemaker’s comments to the schoolmistress, attempting also to offer bland justifications for them. In vain. Every time he returned to the topic, she shrugged her shoulders with annoyance.

“What a bore he is!” she sighed.

“Poor little Cesare!” she laughed one evening, and never before had she seemed so youthful. “He acts like that because he’s very fond of me. You know when it was we first got to know each other?”

“Before the First World War, I imagine.”

“Oh, much earlier than that! From back in elementary school. We both lived in Vicolo del Gregorio.”

“So you came to know Bottecchiari much later.”

“Much later,” she replied drily.

And she gave him a look with a hint of irony, and seemed more youthful than ever.

In the bright late afternoons of September the huge field in front of the church of San Cristoforo was crowded, as it always was when the weather was fine, with children, nursemaids and young couples. Bruno Lattes and Clelia Trotti would speak, sitting close to each other at the edge of the churchyard for the most part, but sometimes on the grass, in the margin of shadow that grew slowly at the southern limit of the portico with the descent of the sun, on the side of Via Borso.

“It’s lovely here, don’t you think?” said Trotti, her eyes turned toward the square. “It doesn’t at all seem as if we’re in a graveyard.”

“I’ve never understood,” she said on one occasion, “why the dead are kept segregated from us, as is our custom, so that if you want to visit them you have to get permission, as you would for a prison visit. Napoleon was undoubtedly a great man as he imposed on Europe, as well as on Italy, via our Cisalpine Republic, the democratic and social triumphs of the Revolution. But as far as his famous edict on cemeteries goes, I remain of the same opinion as the poet of Of Sepulchres.^## You believe me? I’d like them to bury me right here outside, in this lovely field, with all this noise of life going on around, even if that would cost me eternal excommunication.”

She started laughing.

“It’s only a dream, I know,” she quickly added, “a pious desire that won’t ever come true. Apart from some years in prison, some others in internal exile and now this invigilated freedom, what have I done in my life that’s so important to deserve a tomb among the illustrious figures of our city, even the heretical ones? To be sure, I haven’t even been beaten up. The Fascists were more refined with me. When I was leaving the Umberto I elementary school in Via Bersaglieri del Po in 1922, they confined themselves to making me drink a half ounce of cod-liver oil and covering my face with soot. And so what! If it hadn’t been for the children who were standing there watching, and many of them crying from fear, it wouldn’t have upset me that much, I can assure you. There was hardly call to come in a group of twenty or thirty, with cudgels, daggers, skulls on their berets, to subdue a woman on her own. A nice show of force! While I was swallowing my portion of cod-liver oil, I knew that the Blackshirts would have achieved nothing by it except to heap general disapproval on themselves.”

But what she always preferred to talk about was her past as a prisoner and internal exile.

“Prison gives you a real schooling,” she said on another evening, lighting a Macedonia cigarette with the lit stub of the last (a vice, she explained, that—to illustrate the point—she’d picked up in prison), “at least that’s so if it doesn’t go on too long and that it doesn’t break the will or weaken the moral fiber. As regards my own experience, I’m grateful to fate that I wasn’t spared the test. Solitude, concentration, having no company but our own . . . these are worth learning. And to know oneself, to struggle with one’s own tendencies and to emerge from that sometimes victorious, can only happen within the four walls of a cell. When I got out of prison in 1930, I left my number 36 (you see the coincidence?—the same number as my sister’s house) with real sadness, as if I were leaving behind a part of myself. Each wall, each corner, every tiny thing carried a trace of suffering. The truth is that the places where you have wept, where you’ve suffered, where you’ve had to find the many inner resources to keep hoping and resisting, are the ones you grow fondest of. Take yourself, for example. You could have left, like so many of your co-religionists, and after what you’ve had to put up with, you’d have had every right. But you made a different choice. You preferred to stay here, to struggle and suffer. And now this country, this city where you were born, where you grew up and became a man, has become doubly yours. You will never, ever abandon it.”

She would always end like this. Having started, as usual, by telling a story about herself and her own life, she would soon steer the talk toward Bruno and what she thought he should be doing in the immediate future.

On his behalf for quite some time she had been preparing useful contacts with the city’s principal anti-Fascists, she would say, and so, for this very reason, she’d already entrusted Rovigatti with the task of preparing the ground for his imminent visits.

The first people he should approach were undoubtedly the Socialists. But he should take care. Not the notary Licci, a distinctly sour and cantankerous “maximalist”—better leave him to stew in his own juices until he himself decided to shake off his grumpiness and seek out his old friends. Bruno needed to see first of all the lawyers, Baruffaldi, Polenghi and Tamagnini, all three of them Reformists eager to act, and after, returning to the topic of Bottecchiari, to try to link up with his nephew Nino, who for some six or seven months had been taken on as an assistant in his uncle’s office. He was without doubt a very bright and able young man, considering that he’d been able to make an impression even on the Gruppi Universitari Fascisti, where he’d been assigned very important roles in the last two years. She urged Bruno to get in contact with him soon, to avert the possibility that one day or another he’d be lured by some new “totalitarian siren.”

But then, after the Socialists, he needed to get to know the Repubblicani-storici, such as the dentist Canella, the tailor Squarcia, the chemist Riccoboni. These, too, had of late shown unambiguous signs of wanting to shift, of being ready, because of the shared aims of the struggle, to forget their everlasting rancor and anti-Socialist prejudices.

As for the Catholics, their circle, in this respect similar to the Communist one, remained something of a self-contained world which would be hard to enter. All the same, the lawyer Galassi-Tarabini, he at least, was a remarkably open-minded type. Already in close contact with both Count Gròsoli and Don Sturzo, opposed by the Fascist clerics since Pius XI exalted Mussolini to the point of calling him the Man of Providence—yes, he was a person of real integrity, not to be overlooked in any way. And the same could be said of the engineer Sears, a liberal, leaning to the right, but still good-hearted, and of Dr. Herzen, a committed Zionist, agreed, but perhaps recruitable to the cause of Italian anti-Fascism, especially if he were to be approached by a fellow Jew.

And finally he ought to meet up with Alfio Mori, the friend and in some ways the disciple of Antonio Gramsci—they’d got to know each other in prison—the person from whom it’s said that his comrade Ercoli, every time he secretly reenters the country from the Soviet Union, most willingly accepts advice. Mori was the most important of them all, and, as such, was most keenly under surveillance. He would always need to move with extreme prudence. For example, he might arrange a meeting, and Mori wouldn’t turn up. A second one, and Mori would be absent once again. Only on the fifth or the sixth appointment might he finally decide to appear. So it was indispensable to be armed with patience. And if he, Bruno, was prepared to be patient, he might indeed manage also to have a talk with Mori . . .

She talked on and on. The shadows of the steles and gravestones slowly lengthened on the grass, the field little by little shed its crowd of visitors, and some enamored couples moved off in the direction of the city walls.

That evening Bruno was stretched out, as was his habit, at the feet of Clelia Trotti. As he listened without much attention to what the teacher was saying, he noticed a tall, slim, blond boy leaning on the handlebars of his bicycle some twenty meters away.

His head immersed in the pink sheets of the sports pages, he looked as though he were waiting for someone. And there on cue, at the far end of the square, almost running to reach him, was a girl, she, too, blonde and very beautiful, who, while continuing to cross the open field, turned every three or four steps to look back toward Via Borso as if she feared she were being pursued.

But of course it wasn’t true. She was merely playacting.

Once she had reached her friend, she was the first, like a good actress, to slip down on to the grass, with the rapid, graceful movements of one hand arranging her pleated, white woolen dress around her legs. With the other hand she tugged affectionately at the boy, who had remained standing, to sit down beside her.

Soon the two of them were sitting close to each other, beside the bicycle with their backs turned. Their young heads were so close as to be touching. Suffused with the mild air, delighted by the light touching of their bodies, it seemed as though they had no need to speak. “Who are they? What are their names?” Bruno was wondering while the voice of Clelia Trotti sounded distantly in his ear, an incomprehensible hum. He couldn’t remember their names. He was quite sure, though, that they were both still at school, perhaps at the liceo classico, and that they both belonged to one of the city’s upper-middle-class families.

Ten or so minutes passed.

Suddenly Bruno saw the boy move. He got back to his feet, calmly picked up the bicycle and then grasped his friend by her wrist. Letting herself go heavy, she now laughed with a lazy flirtatiousness, leaning her whole neck back.

They began to move off in the direction of the walls, crossing the field on a diagonal.

“Why don’t we go down there too?” Bruno asked.

Stretching out his left arm, he pointed at the Mura degli Angeli still in full sunlight.

“But it’s late. I’m afraid we won’t have time,” Clelia Trotti, interrupted mid-sentence, replied. “You know I have to turn in along with the hens!”

“What will it matter just this once? We’ll be able to see a magnificent sunset.”

He had already stood up. He stretched out a hand to help her get up, and then they walked on.

The young couple were about fifty meters ahead of them. The boy was sitting on his bike, and every now and then, to keep his balance, he encircled his companion’s shoulders with his right arm. Bruno watched them with an insatiable interest. “Who are they? What are their names?” he kept muttering under his breath. They seemed to him more than beautiful—marvellous, incomparable. There they were: the champions, the prototypes of their race! he said to himself with hatred and a desperate love, half-closing his eyes. Their blood was better than his, their souls were finer than his. If he wasn’t mistaken, the girl’s hair was tied at the back with a red ribbon. The little light that remained seemed to concentrate itself on that ribbon.

Oh, to be them, to be one of them, despite everything!

“I did well to let you persuade me. From the top of the wall we’ll be able to enjoy a truly extraordinary sunset,” Clelia Trotti calmly observed.

Bruno turned round. So she had seen nothing. Yet again she’d noticed nothing at all. And now once more she’d continued with what she’d been saying. Talking as if to herself. As if pursuing her dream. Lost, as ever, in the unending, lonely ravings of a convict.

He shivered.

Perhaps one day she would understand who Bruno Lattes was, he thought, turning back to look before him. But that day, if it should ever arrive, was still surely a long way off.

^* A local orchestra.

^† See footnote on p. 41.

^‡ A political party of the center, but anti-Fascist. For information about the Comitato, see footnote on p. 66.

^§ The Action Party was a radical Socialist party formed in 1942 and dissolved in 1947. It adopted the name of Guiseppe Mazzini’s democratic party from nearly a century before.

^¶ See footnote on p. 68.

^# Sciagura/meaning “calamity” in Italian/is the nickname of Carlo Aretusi, a prominent member of Ferrara’s Fascist squad who reappears throughout The Novel of Ferrara and takes center stage in “A Night in ’43.”

^** See the footnote about this organization on p. 78.

^†† A Bologna newspaper that was founded in 1885, and was under Fascist control from 1923 to 1943.

^‡‡ The Bollettino della Vittoria was the final address to the army and the nation issued by the chief of staff, General Armando Diaz, at the conclusion of the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, which ended the First World War in Italy.

^§§ Benedetto Croce (1866– 1952) was an Italian thinker whose ideas had great importance for Bassani and whose voluminous work spanned politics, history, philosophy, aesthetics, and poetry. He was also an active politician, critical of the Fascist regime and the only non-Jewish figure to refuse to answer a Fascist questionnaire enquiring about the racial background of Italian intellectuals.

^¶¶ An exceptional linguist, abducted to Germany in the Venlo Incident in 1939; actually a major but promoted during his long captivity to lieutenant colonel— thought to have disclosed secrets to the Nazis under interrogation.

^## Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827), an important Italian poet whose most famous work is Dei sepolcri.