1.

I’VE been unhappy many times in my life, as a child, as a boy, as a man; many times, if I think about it, I’ve touched what are called the depths of despair. And yet I can recall few periods blacker for me than the months from October 1929 to June 1930, when I had just started the ginnasio superiore.^* The years lived since then have not, in the end, been of any use: I haven’t managed to remedy the suffering which has remained there like a hidden wound, secretly bleeding. To cure it? To be rid of it? I don’t know if that will ever be possible.

From the first days there, I had felt out of place and deeply uneasy. I didn’t like the classroom where they had put us, at the end of a dark corridor; such a far cry from the happy and familiar one, on to which opened the thirteen doors of the ginnasio inferiore classrooms, which were divided into three lower sections and two higher. I didn’t like the new teachers, with their aloof, ironic manner that discouraged any warmth, any friendly relations—they used the formal “Lei” with all of us!—even when it didn’t actually threaten that in the immediate future we’d be subjected to regimes almost as harsh and severe as a prison, as was the case with Guzzo, the Latin teacher, or Signora Krauss, who taught chemistry and natural sciences. I didn’t like my new companions, who had come from 5A and with whom we of 5B had been amalgamated. They seemed so different from us, maybe cleverer than us, better-looking than us and from better families than ours. They were, to sum up, irremediably foreign to us. And so I could neither understand nor condone the behavior of many of our own who, unlike me, had quickly sought to make common cause with them, rewarded, as I noted with consternation, by a reciprocal warmth and an equally easy-going acquiescence. How could that be possible, even conceivable? I wondered with discontent and jealousy. My keeping of the faith, crudely offended even on the first day of school, when I caught sight of Meldolesi, our beloved fifth-form literature teacher, disappearing into the distance at the head of his new fourth form down the school corridor (from now on a forbidden place where we could no longer set foot); my absurd faith would have wanted an invisible line of demarcation to continue, keeping apart the remainder of the two old fifth forms even at upper school, in such a way that we of the B class would be protected and safeguarded from any betrayal, from any contamination.

But the event that undoubtedly embittered me most was that Otello Forti, the old friend I’d shared a desk with from primary school, hadn’t managed to pass the fifth-form exam—I myself, the year before, had to retake mathematics in October, but he, although earlier he had only had to retake English, had been failed definitively that October. Not only did I now no longer have him seated as ever on my right, but I couldn’t even meet him outside at the school gates, at midday, to walk back along the Corso Giovecca together, each of us going to our respective homes—nor could I meet him at the Montagnone to play soccer in the afternoon, nor at his house, most of all, his lovely, big, happy house, full of brothers and sisters, of boy and girl cousins, where I had passed the greater part of my adolescence—since Otello, poor thing, unable to bear his unfair failure, had got his father’s permission to repeat the fifth year at Padua in a boarding school run by the Barnabite Order. Deprived of Otello, no longer able to enjoy his massive, slightly obtuse presence at my side, his body so much bigger and heavier than mine, no longer to be stimulated or even goaded by the gruff, ironic, but still affectionate reserve which he always deployed at my expense, whenever, either at his house or mine, we did our homework together. Right from the start I’d felt that persistent pain, the inconsolable emptiness of the bereaved. What did it matter that he wrote some letters to me from Padua in which, with an eloquence that astonished me—I’d never had him pegged as very intelligent—he poured out all his affection? What did it matter that I replied to him with no lesser effusions? I was now at the liceo, he was stuck in the ginnasio. I was at Ferrara and he at Padua—this was the insuperable reality which he, with the courage, unexpected clear-sightedness and maturity of all defeated souls, showed himself even more aware of than I was. I wrote to him: “We’ll see each other at Christmas.” And he replied, that yes, at Christmas, some two and a half months off, perhaps we would meet again (on condition he obtained, as he swore to himself he would, the right grades in all his subjects—something that was by no means certain!), but anyway, ten or so days spent together wouldn’t really alter the situation. He seemed to be suggesting: “Go on, forget me! If you haven’t made another friend yet, go out and find one!” No, writing to each other achieved very little. So little, in fact, that after the holidays at the beginning of November, after All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, then Armistice Day, by unspoken agreement, we gave up altogether.

I needed to vent my unhappiness, to show it. So, on the first day of school I made sure that I didn’t join the usual stampede to grab the best desks, the ones closest to the teacher’s podium, at which, at the beginning of every year, my school companions would launch themselves. Leaving this battle to the others, to ours and theirs, I held back at the doorway of the classroom to observe the scene with distaste, and in the end, went so far as to sit down, down there by the window, at the furthest corner desk reserved for the girls. It was the only seat left unoccupied: a big desk, ill-adapted to my less than average size, but perfectly befitting my intense desire to be in exile. Who knows how many slovenly failures and year-repeaters it had been host to before me! I thought to myself. I read on the tarry surface of the tilted desktop all that had been carved by the penknives of my predecessors (mainly invectives against the whole teaching body, but especially against the headmaster, Turolla, nicknamed Halfpint). Looking around, over the thirty-odd heads and necks bent over in an orderly fashion in front of me, I was filled with acrimony. My recent failure in math still riled me. I was in a hurry to reestablish myself, to be considered once again one of the best and brightest pupils. And yet, for the first time, I understood the perspective of the idlers in the back row. School seen as a prison, the headmaster as its warden, the teachers as its guards and my school companions as fellow jailbirds: a system, in short, in which any eager collaboration should be resisted, while every chance to denigrate and sabotage it should be embraced. Those waves of anarchic scorn that, with a touch of fear, I had felt surging from the back of the class since primary school, how well I now understood them!

I scanned the scene before me and disapproved of all and sundry. The girls, humiliated by having to wear their black smocks, as a group amounted to nothing. Just little girls, the four who occupied the first two double desks, all of whom came from 5A; with their tight pigtails swaying on their slender backs, they seemed like kiddies from the kindergarten. What were they called? Their surnames all ended in ini : Bergamini, Bolognini, Santini, Scanavini, Zaccarini—that sort of thing, which brought to mind, with their diminutives, the most petit-bourgeois of families—milliners, delicatessen shopkeepers, book-binders, council employees and so on. The two girls at the third desk, Cavicchi and Gabrieli, the first very fat, the second bony and skinny with the pallid, spotty face of a thirty-year-old spinster, represented what remained of 5B’s “females”: hunched and greyish, undoubtedly the two ugliest girls, destined to work as pharmacists or schoolmistresses and to be reckoned as mere objects, things. The remaining three girls positioned at the fourth and fifth desks—Balboni and Jovine at the fourth and Manoja alone at the fifth—came from outside the city: Balboni from the countryside—you could see that clearly enough from the way she was dressed, poor thing; her mother might well have been the village dressmaker, a position acquired without exacting qualifications, and likely it was she who had constructed those dresses . . . and Jovine came from Potenza, Manoja from Viterbo. These two were probably part of the retinue of low-grade civil servants or railway employees transferred to northern Italy as a reward for special merit. How sad and boring! Was it some kind of rule that girls who continued their studies always had to look like this, dejected, characterless crones (who didn’t even wash that often judging by the odor of mold that wafted from them), while beauties such as Legnani and Bertoni, for example, the two vamps of 5B, were promptly failed? But Legnani and Bertoni couldn’t have cared less. The former was, it seemed, about to get married; with her wasp waist, her short, shiny black fringe and those wicked eyes like the starlet Elsa ­Merlini’s—fat chance that she’d repeat the fifth form! She was the type to slink off to Rome to become an actress—as we’d often heard her say. She wasn’t likely to rot away behind the door of the liceo!

But it was the boys who were the main target of my criticism, especially the two pairs who occupied the desks in the center row facing the teacher’s podium. Down there, in the first and second desks, 5A had planted all of three interlopers, Boldoni, Grassi and Droghetti, beside whom in the second desk sat Florestano Donaddio from 5B, who seemed an uninvited but tolerated guest, abject as he was in his physique, in his studies, in everything. The son of a cavalry officer, with that irreproachable and stupid look of his that convinced you he was sure to follow exactly in his father’s footsteps, Droghetti was certainly a mediocrity. But the two in front, Boldini and Grassi, among the brightest and best of 5A, together represented a real force, and the small-statured, rosy-cheeked and blond Donadio, wee timorous creature that he’d always been, had evidently offered himself as their assistant and vassal. Another baleful combination sat in the third row: Giovannini from B and Camurri from A. For the sake of clarity, it wasn’t that Giovannini was any worse than the other—despite coming from the country, the good Walter even managed to speak a reasonably convincing Italian. But Camurri was upper class: ugly, short sighted and sanctimonious, but upper class. His family—who didn’t know of the Camurris of Via Carlo Mayr?—was among the richest in the city. They owned hundreds of hectares in the Codigoro area, precisely in that part of the country from which Walter came, so it wasn’t at all unlikely that his grandfather and father had once been, or even still were, in service to the Camurri household . . . In the fourth row alone—who knows why, unless it showed that no one had sufficiently aristocratic lineage to be beside him, sat Cattolica, Carlo Cattolica, who from primary school onward had always been the undisputed genius of the A class (regularly receiving top marks in every subject). Although it might seem improbable, it was no sweat for him to communicate, if need be, with the no less trusted Boldini and Grasso in the first row via the dependable backs of Camurri and Droghetti leaning over their desks in front of him. It was a marvel to behold how they managed this in Greek and Latin classes. Messages were passed from the fourth row to the first, and vice versa, with the same ease as if they’d had a field telephone at their disposal.

Behind Cattolica, two of ours: Mazzanti and Malagù, two nonentities, more or less. And, on my right, leaning over their desks with the sole aim of ducking down and escaping the eagle eyes of the teacher as much as possible, sat Veronesi and Danieli, the first at least twenty and the second even older: a pair inured to continually repeating the year, veteran slackers, useless even at sport, and for years regular frequenters of brothels. And even if the places in the row of desks closest to the door, those in front of the blackboard, seemed a slightly better assortment (in the second desk Giorgio Selmi had ended up next to Chieregatti, in the third Ballerini had managed to place himself once again with the inseparable Giovanardi), how could I resign myself to be paired with Lattuga in the fourth desk, the wretched, stinking Lattuga, who throughout his days at school had rarely found anyone willing to sit beside him, and this year too, like Cattolica, though for completely different reasons, had remained all alone. No, no, far better the solitude of the place I had chosen in the row of girls. Bianchi, the Italian teacher, had begun his series of lessons by declaiming one of Dante’s “Canzoni,” and one verse had especially struck me: “The exile imposed on me I hold as an honor.” That could have been my banner and motto.

One day I was distractedly looking out of the big window to my left at the glum courtyard inhabited by starved cats which separated the Guarini School building, a former convent, from the side of the Gesù Church. I was thinking that after all it would have been good if, for example, Giorgio Selmi, who had always seemed at heart a likeable boy, had taken the initiative on the first day of school to ask me to share with him. Selmi was an orphan whose father and mother were both dead. He lived with his brother Luigi at the house of his paternal uncle, the lawyer Armando, a grumpy bachelor of about sixty who couldn’t wait to be rid of his nephews, having found a place for one of them in the military academy at Modena and the other in the Livorno Naval Academy. And yet, why on earth had Giorgio preferred to put himself beside that grim hunchback Chieregatti rather than me? His uncle’s apartment in Piazza Sacrati—legal offices annexed to a few rooms that served as living quarters—certainly wouldn’t have sufficed for the two of us to do our homework in, if it was true that he, Giorgio, had to study in his bedroom, a broom cupboard of barely three by four meters. By contrast, at my house, we would have had all the space we needed at our disposal. My study was big enough for me, him and whoever else might have wanted to join our partnership. Besides, my mother, delighted that I was now spending my afternoons at home, and not at Forti’s house as I had done at the ginnasio—would have brought us who knows what splendid snacks at five o’clock, accompanied by tea, butter and jam! It really was a shame that Giorgio Selmi hadn’t chosen to pair up with me. No doubt this was a result of envy, of jealousy. My home was too fine and comfortable compared to his. And then, I had a mother, and he didn’t—all he had was a scurvy old uncle. Every now and then, anti-Semitism proved to be an irrelevant factor.

“Sss!”

A faint whistle, coming from my right, made me start. I abruptly turned round. It was Veronesi. Crouched behind Mazzanti’s shoulders, he was signaling to me with his thin, incredibly nicotine-stained forefinger, to turn round and look in front of me. What was I doing? he seemed to be asking, half amused, half worried. Did I not know where I happened to be, mad idiot that I was?

I obeyed. In the absolute silence, barely broken by a ripple of laughter, the whole class had turned their faces in my direction. Even Guzzo, the teacher, seated up at the front, was staring at me with a grin.

“At last,” he sighed.

I stood up.

“And your name is?”

I stammered out my surname.

Guzzo was famous for his nastiness, a nastiness bordering on sadism. About fifty years old, tall, Herculean, with big, blazing, greenish reptilian eyes beneath an enormous Wagnerian forehead, and two long grey sideburns which grew halfway down his bony cheeks, he was deemed a kind of genius at the Guarini School (it was he who had composed the epigraph for the fallen of the First World War so conspicuously emblazoned on the entrance corridor: “Mors domuit corpora—Vicit mortem virtus ”).^† He wasn’t enrolled in the Fascist party and because of this, and only because of this, everybody said, he hadn’t been granted the university chair which various of his philological writings, published in Germany, would otherwise surely have warranted.

“What?” he asked, curling a hand behind his ear, leaning forward with his broad chest against the open ledger. “Will you please raise your voice!”

He was enjoying himself, that was clear. He was toying with me.

I repeated my surname.

He brusquely sat up, and carefully checked the ledger.

“Good,” he concluded, while he made a mysterious pen stroke in it.

“Now, will you tell me a little about yourself?” he went on, leaning back in his chair again.

“About me?”

“Indeed. About you. To which part of the fifth form did you belong, A or B?

“B.”

He made a wry face. “Ah, to B. Good. And how have you got here? With one flying jump or—forgive my poor memory—are you trying a second time?”

“I have to retake math in October.”

“And only math?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure you don’t have to ‘retake’—ugly but serviceable word—any other subjects? Latin or Greek, for example?”

I shook my head.

“Are you quite sure?” he insisted with feline meekness.

I denied it again.

“Well then, my good fellow, pay attention. I wouldn’t want for you to have to retake Latin and Greek as well as math this summer . . . quod Deus avertat . . . three subjects . . . you do catch my drift, don’t you?”

He asked me how I had done in the ginnasio, and if I had ever been held back a year. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking around as though he thought me untrustworthy and was soliciting testimony from whoever was willing to supply it.

“He always does well. One of the best,” someone dared to venture, perhaps Pavani, there, in the first desk in the front row.

“Ah, so one of the best!” Guzzo exclaimed. “But if he belonged to the chosen few in lower school . . . how come this falling off? How did that come to pass?”

I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the desk as if the answer Guzzo sought would come to me from that ancient blackened wood.

I lifted up my head.

“How come?” he persisted implacably. “And why have you chosen a desk such as that one? Perhaps to be close to the excellent Veronesi and to the no less excellent Danieli, so as to learn true wisdom from them, rather than from me?”

The class broke out in unanimous laughter. Even Veronesi and Danieli laughed, though less heartily.

“No, no, you should pay heed,” continued Guzzo, controlling the turmoil with the broad sweeping gesture of a conductor. “First of all, you must change places.”

I looked about, weighed up and narrowed down the options.

“There. In the fourth desk. Next to that gentleman.”

He pointed at Cattolica.

“What’s your name?”

Cattolica stood up.

“Carlo Cattolica,” he replied plainly.

“Ah, good . . . the famous Cattolica, good, good. You come from 5A, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, good. A with B. Perfect.”

I gathered up my books, stepped into the aisle, reached my new desk, greeted in passing by a cough from Veronesi and welcomed on arrival by a smile from the ace of the A form.

“So be careful, Cattolica,” Guzzo said in the meantime. “I’m entrusting him to you. Lead this poor lost sheep back to the straight and narrow.”

2.

I HAVE absolutely no idea what became of Carlo Cattolica in these last thirty years.

He’s the only one of my school companions about whom I know nothing: what career he took up, if he ever married, where he lives, or if he is still alive. I can only say that in 1933, after he passed the final school exams with the highest marks, he had to leave Ferrara to move to Turin, where his father, an engineer—a little bald chap with blue eyes, maniacally dedicated to opera and stamp-collecting, browbeaten by his math teacher wife who was a whole head taller than him—had unexpectedly been given secure employment in, I believe, a paint factory. Did Cattolica, the son, become an important surgeon, as he had predicted since the beginning of 1930, confident in himself as ever? Did he actually get married to the girl he went on his bicycle to meet every evening in Bondeno, and to whom he was, then, “officially” engaged—Accolti, Graziella Accolti, I think she was called? Our generation has been buffeted about like few others. The war and all the rest of it obliterated a multitude of our intentions and vocations no less resolute than those of Carlo Cattolica. And yet something tells me he is alive, is a surgeon as he dreamed of being and that, even though he left Ferrara when still a boy, all the same he ended up marrying his Graziella. Will we two ever meet again? Who can say? I realize that’s a possibility. But I should press on regardless.

I can still see Cattolica’s fine-featured, clear-cut profile to my right, precisely modelled as on a medal. He was tall, very thin, with lively black eyes set under arched, rather prominent eyebrows and a forehead that wasn’t high but broad, pale, placid, very beautiful. It’s odd but the earliest image I have of him is likewise in profile. We both went to the primary school, Alfonso da Varonno in Via Bellaria, even then in different classes, and one morning, in the school courtyard, during recess, I was struck by his way of running. He sped round the perimeter wall, moving his thin legs with the long, regular, scythe-like strides of a middle-distance runner. I asked Otello Forti who he was. “What? Don’t you know who that is? It’s Cattolica!” Otello had answered, wide-eyed. He ran, I noticed differently from all the others, myself included, as if nothing could distract him or force him to veer off course. He advanced calmly looking ahead, as though he was the only one, he alone among all the others, who was sure of where he was going.

Now we were sitting close together, only a few inches from each other, but a sort of secret border, a demarcation line, stopped us communicating with the relaxed familiarity of friendship. To begin with, to tell the truth, I had made a few tentative attempts. One morning during Latin class work I had asked him, for example, if I might, due to exceptional circumstances, slip the two fat volumes of my dictionary into the space under our desk reserved for him, for his books and exercise books. And yet the chill rotation of a very few degrees which Cattolica, in consenting, performed on the axis of his face, had quickly dissuaded me from any further requests of this kind. What else was I hoping for anyway? I wondered. Wasn’t the social significance, the worldly uplift of our union enough for me? Every year of the ginnasio from the first to the fifth, he had been the best pupil of the A class, not to speak of elementary school, where the teachers passed around his compositions in the corridors. Yet I too, despite a slip every now and then, had always been a part of the select top group. And so? Being, as we were, the standard-bearers of two historically rival factions, wasn’t it better that we behave precisely so, each of us remaining, for all intents and purposes, in our proper places?

As a rule, we displayed ample mutual consideration; the maximum respect and chivalry. Every now and then, after being tested, we’d return to our desk graciously bestowing on each other smiles of approval, congratulatory handshakes; nevertheless, anxious that Mazzanti behind us (who, being aware of the situation and scenting the chance to extract some advantage from it for himself and Malagù, had soon begun his own record-book in which he accurately tallied up the marks each day) hadn’t made any errors, and had maintained that unwavering fairness and impartiality in the faithful record-keeping to which he laid claim. But then, during class work, how precipitously those frail castles of opportunistic hypocrisy crumbled away. In such circumstances, no passage of Greek or Latin was hard enough to master that it could ever induce us to join forces. Each of us would work independently, jealously and meanly avid for our own marks, even ready, just so as to owe nothing to the other side, to turn in an unfinished or erroneous version. As I had foreseen, Droghetti and Camurri acted as go betweens for Cattolica and the distant advance posts of Boldini and Grassi. When time was restricted, when our teacher Guzzo, having raised his eyes from the proofs of some essay of his on Suetonius, would announce with a cruel smile that in exactly two minutes, and not a moment more, he would send out the “excellent” Chieregatti to collect the “manuscripts of you gentlemen,” you’d have to have seen it to believe with what impudent efficiency the telephone network of the A section was made to work! Goodbye, then, to any exchange of smiles and handshakes; goodbye to any feigned comradely courtesies. The mask fell off. And when it fell, the irreprehensible face of Cattolica, pent up and twisted with factional striving, showed itself to me in all its hostile, hateful reality. Naked, at last.

And yet, even though I loathed him, I admired and envied him at the same time.

Perfect in everything, in Italian as in Latin, in Greek as in history and philosophy, in science as in mathematics and physics, art history and even gymnastics—I was let off religious studies and didn’t attend the lessons of Father Fonseca, but I had no doubt that even with “the Priest” Cattolica was impeccable—I hated and at the same time envied his mental clarity, the lucid working of his mind. What an addled klutz I was compared to him! It was true; perhaps in Italian essay-writing I outdid him. But not always, as there was a range of topics, some that suited me, some that didn’t, and when an argument didn’t appeal to me, there was nothing to be done—then it would be a fluke if I managed to get six out of ten. Perhaps I also outshone him in Latin and Greek orals—after that initial skirmish, Guzzo had begun to warm to me and, reading Homer or Herodotus, especially Herodotus, he almost always turned to me to elicit what he called the “exact translation”—but in the written exercises, especially in translating from Italian into Latin, Cattolica was decidedly better, recalling all the most recondite little rules of morphology and syntax, and practically never making a mistake. His memory was such that when tested in history, he could recite scores of dates without a single error, or in natural sciences, reel off the classifications of invertebrates to the enraptured Signora Krauss with the same sureness and nonchalance as though he were reading them from the textbook. God, how did he do it? I wondered. What was he hiding in his head? A calculator? And Mazzanti didn’t hesitate—after such displays of mnemonic bravura he was always prompt to mark down a nine or even a nine-plus in his ledger. And the worst of it was, that it was often me who, turning round, would insist on that “plus” being added.

But my sense of inferiority didn’t derive as much from a comparison of our respective scholastic efforts as from everything else.

First, his height. He was tall, slender, already a young man, and dressed in an adult fashion, in long grey vicuña trousers, with non-matching jackets in heavy fabric (in the pocket of which would be a packet of ten Macedonia cigarettes), an organdie cravat around his neck; while I, short and stocky, burdened with the eternal zouave trousers which my mother favored—beside him, how could I seem anything other than an undistinguished little boy? Then sports. Cattolica didn’t indulge in any of them, he even looked down on soccer, and not because he couldn’t play (once in the churchyard of the Gesù Church we’d improvised a kick around and he’d shown what a stylish player he was), but “just because”: because sports didn’t interest him he considered it a waste of time. Besides, what course of studies would I pursue at university? I didn’t know: one day I inclined toward medicine, the next toward law, the next again toward the arts, while he had not only chosen medicine, but had decided between general medicine and surgery, opting for the latter. And finally, there was the girl he went out with, the young lady from Bondeno. In matters of love, I hadn’t had the least, serious, actual experience—would the summertime beach encounters I’d had with those young girls even count as experience? A little holding of hands, staring into one another’s eyes, the odd furtive peck on the cheek, and nothing more . . . He, on the other hand, was officially engaged with a conspicuous ring on his finger. Oh, that ring! It was a sapphire mounted on white gold, an important, senatorial ring, especially displeasing. And yet, what would I have given to own one myself! Who knows, I thought to myself, perhaps to become a man, or at least to acquire that basic minimum of self-confidence to pass oneself off as such, a ring of that sort would surely be an accessory, a great help!

Who did he, Cattolica, do his homework with in the afternoons? At first, I couldn’t work this out. He seemed so self-sufficient, so aloof, that I was inclined to concede him no real, no close friend. I thought that even his relationship with Boldini and Grassi was based on necessity, and that at his home in Via Cittadella no school friend would ever be invited, not even them.

But I was wrong.

To tell the truth, I’d had an inkling some time before: that morning when, as the last one out, I’d gone down the stairs from the chemistry and biology lab, Krauss’s exclusive domain, and then had suddenly seen in front of me that very trio—Cattolica, Boldini and Grassi—halted on a landing in deep conversation. Seeing them there, I immediately guessed that they were arranging to meet up again in one of their houses in the afternoon. In fact, they quickly changed the subject, aware of my approach. They began talking about soccer—just imagine it! As if I didn’t know Cattolica had no interest in sports, and would never discuss it.

All the same, I wanted to be sure, I wanted physical evidence. So, that very evening, not having found my father at the Merchants’ Club—from the time I’d stopped studying with Otello I’d taken to stopping in at the club almost every evening at about seven—I suddenly made up my mind. Instead of going straight home, I’d rushed off to station myself at the corner of Viale Cavour and Via Cittadella.

It was still some twenty minutes before eight. From the Castle to the Customs Barrier, Viale Cavour sparkled with lights, while Via Cittadella, broad and stony, seemed steeped in a dark mist. I stood at the corner and stared toward the Cattolicas’ house, which was a couple of hundred meters away. It was a smallish, red, detached building, recently constructed—undoubtedly graceful, I thought, but with something tasteless about it. Weren’t they a bit vulgar, a touch dubious, the pink curtains that adorned the lit-up second floor windows? Some of those little houses in Via Colomba where Danieli and Veronesi spent a good part of their afternoons behind closed shutters gave a hint of something similar.

I waited a quarter of an hour. And I was considering leaving—having begun to suspect that they’d arranged to meet elsewhere, either at Grassi’s in Piazza Ariostea or at Boldini’s in Via Ripagrande—when the street door opened and, one after the other, the three of them, Cattolica included, trooped out.

All three of them then went back up Viale Cavour on their bikes, slowly enough to allow me to step back from the corner unseen. Once there, however, the trio parted company, Boldini and Grassi turning left, straight toward the city center, and Cattolica to the right, toward the Customs Barrier.

Where was Cattolica off to?

For a good while I tracked him at a distance, my eyes glued to the back light of his shiny, grey Maino bike. It was clear—he was going round to his fiancée’s at Bondeno. But the idea that, after a busy day of studying—the morning at school basking in universal approval, then the afternoon at home soothed by the admiration and affection of his closest friends—he could then award himself an evening session smooching with his fiancée was suddenly unbearable to me.

3.

ALTHOUGH OTELLO Forti had received an excellent report at the end of his first term, he wanted to spend no more than three days with his family: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Santo Stefano. I hardly saw him—not until a few hours before his return to Padua, and by then he was already utterly taken up with the thought of leaving.

I had gone to see him at his house, number 24, Via Montebello.

He had immediately taken me to admire the big dazzling Nativity scene, arranged as ever in the ground floor drawing room, but as to its construction, that year, for the first time in at least ten years, none of his brothers had thought to invite me round to help. Then we went up to his bedroom. And yet, not even up there, on the top floor, in that little room which I’d always considered somewhat my own, did I manage to make myself useful. As soon as I’d entered, Otello, with unfamiliar courtesy, had made me sit down in the armchair next to the window. Then he busied himself with packing his suitcase. And when I stood up to help him he insisted I sit down again. He preferred to do it himself, he said, he’d get it all done much more quickly on his own.

I did as I was told. In the meantime, I watched him. Without raising his eyes, he kept going back and forth to his suitcase with a slowness that seemed to me studied. I remembered him as blonder, chubbier, with a pinker complexion—and perhaps, aside from the long trousers that made him look slimmer, he had indeed lost some weight and grown an inch or two. But above all in his eyes, behind the glasses he wore for short-sightedness, there had now settled a serious, solemn, bitter expression which pained and wounded me. It’s true that he’d never been of an open disposition. It had always been me who took the initiative in everything, in our games, our bike rides into the country, our out-of-school reading (Salgari, Verne, Dumas); he, for his part, letting himself be dragged along, grumbling and resistant, but sometimes even laughing, thank heavens, and secretly admiring me precisely because I managed to make him laugh every now and then. But now? What had changed between us? How was it my fault that he’d been failed? Why didn’t he wipe off that resentful scowl?

“What’s up with you?” I’d tried to ask him.

“With me? Nothing. Why?”

“I don’t know. It really looks as if you’ve got something against me.”

“Lucky you, you’re still the same,” Otello had replied, with a brief, notional smile that strayed no further than his lips.

He was evidently alluding to my inveterate tendency to worry over trifles, my eternal need to have others like me, as well as to the change brought about in his character by misfortune. If that’s what I wanted to do, I could keep on wasting time with my usual childish whims. But not he, he neither had the time nor the inclination. Misfortune had made a man of him, and a man had to deal with serious things.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I replied. “But, I’m sorry, is this any way to behave? If you’d at least have written . . . ”

“It seems to me that I did write. Didn’t you receive my letters?”

“I did, yes, but . . . ”

“Well, then?”

He raised his eyes and gave me a hard, hostile stare.

“How many times did you write to me? Three letters in the first fortnight. And then nothing after.”

“And you?”

He was right, the first who’d failed to reply was me. But how could I explain to him, at this point, the reasons why I hadn’t felt like dragging on a correspondence in which our roles had suddenly been reversed? I had thought it was for me to console him for his ill fortune, and yet in some way it had been he, from the start, who’d had to console and chide me.

Later, making the most of the day’s mild weather—there was no comparison with the brutal winter of the year before; regardless that the season was well advanced, the cold spell had still not dug in—we had gone down to walk in the garden. In the blue, slightly misty light of dusk we had completed a kind of tour of the treasured sites of our friendship: of the lovely central lawn, now damp and patchy, where he and I, along with his brothers and cousins, had played many a game of croquet; of the rustic shed beyond the lawn, the ground floor of which served for a woodpile and coal cellar, and its first floor for a dovecote; and finally of the wooded rise, down there by the outer wall, on top of which Giuseppe, his older brother, had built a greyish hut, half worm-eaten beams and half wire fencing, once a chicken coop, for his rabbit breeding project. It was mainly Otello who spoke. He gave a sketchy account of his life at school: tough, certainly—he admitted—mainly due to the brutal morning call by the “prefects” (they had to get up at a quarter past five, and then all of them rushed down to the chapel), but “cleverly planned” so they couldn’t sit around dawdling, and always had something to do. The curriculum? Much broader than ours of the year before. For Latin, they had to prepare the third book of the Aeniad, Cicero’s Letters and Sallust’s Jugurthine War. For Greek, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Lucian’s Dialogues and a selection of Plutarch’s Lives. For Italian I promessi sposi and Orlando furioso.

“All of Orlando furioso ?” I exclaimed.

“The whole lot,” he replied drily.

But there was one question I was burning to ask him, and which I only managed to do, in the doorway, just as I was leaving.

“Have you made friends with anyone?”

To which he replied with evident satisfaction that yes, of course—he had got to know a Venetian boy whom he liked a lot, and they studied together. He was called Alverà, Leonardo Alverà—his father was a count!—a good guy and “also” good at Italian, Latin and Greek, “but” especially good at math and geometry, subjects, that was for sure, in which no one could compete with him. If every now and then I would dash off a poem, a short story, he, with the same ease, just for his own pleasure, solved the most complex equations. What a phenomenon! With a brain like that, who could tell what he’d achieve as an adult—become a scientist, an inventor, in short “a Marconi” . . .

I can’t be sure if what I’m about to tell you took place on the eighth of January, as we went back to school after Epiphany. It’s likely that it did. In any case, one early morning, a half-hour before the bell rang, I’d gone into the Gesù Church where I’d never before set foot—whenever he was confronted with a tough bit of classwork or an important oral exam Otello went there, as I put it to myself, to “propitiate the gods,” but I had only accompanied him as far as the threshold and no farther.

The church seemed empty. I had slowly walked up the right aisle, gazing up and around like a tourist, but the sunlight which shone through the large upper windows stopped me from seeing the large baroque canvases hung above the altar clearly. Having reached the transept, immersed like the rest in semi-darkness, I’d crossed to the left aisle, which was flooded with light. And there my attention was suddenly drawn to a strange gathering of motionless and silent figures, huddled beside the second of the smaller entrances.

Who were they? As I came to realize as soon as I’d come close enough, they were not living people but life sized carved statues of painted wood. They were, as it turned out, the famous Pianzùn d’la Rosa to which as a child I’d been taken many times (though not here at the Gesù, but at the della Rosa Church of Via Armari) by my Aunt Malvina, the only Catholic aunt that I had. Once again, I looked at the ghastly scene: the wretched, bruised body of the dead Christ, stretched out on the bare ground, and around him, petrified in mute attitudes, in soundless grimaces, in endless grief, never to be released in words, were gathered his relatives and friends: the Madonna, Saint John, Joseph of Arimathea, Simon, Mary Magdalene, and two pious women. Looking again at this scene, I remembered Aunt Malvina, who never managed to restrain her tears at this same spectacle. She would draw her black spinsterish shawl across her eyes, then kneel down, without, of course, daring to make her little unbaptized nephew kneel beside her.

Finally, I roused myself, looking around before leaving.

I spotted Carlo Cattolica down there, kneeling composedly in a pew off the central nave.

My initial impulse was to leave him undisturbed, and make off without being seen. Yet, instead, with my heart beating hard, I went down the left aisle on tiptoe till I came level with him.

He was praying with his satchel of books beside him, his pure, beautiful forehead leaning on his clasped hands, and proffering to my observing gaze the same finely chiselled, indecipherable profile that I would notice every day at school. Why weren’t we friends? I wondered, tormented. Why couldn’t we become friends? Perhaps he didn’t respect me? No, it couldn’t be that: even if they were hard-working and bright, Boldini and Grassi certainly weren’t better than me. Because of religion, then? No, it wasn’t to do with that either. Our different religions had never cropped up between me and Otello. On the contrary, if anything, at the Fortis’, even if they were all extremely pious and militantly active in Catholic organizations—the lawyer Forti belonged to the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, and Giuseppe had also joined, two years ago—no one had ever made me feel it mattered that I was Jewish. And Cattolica’s parents weren’t known to be especially churchy. So why was it? Why?

Cattolica had got to his feet, made the sign of the cross and then seen me.

“Oh! What are you doing here?” he asked in lowered tones as soon as he had come over to me.

I’d signaled with my thumb.

“I was looking at the Pianzùn d’la Rosa.”

“Didn’t you know it?”

Only too well—I explained—having seen it on many occasions in the della Rosa Church as a child. And as we walked toward the statues I held forth about my Aunt Malvina and her ruling passion—visiting all the churches of Ferrara.

This information seemed to interest him. He wanted to know who this aunt was. Was she by any chance my mother’s sister?

“No, my grandmother’s,” I replied. “My mother’s mother. She was called Marchi.”

Meanwhile, we’d walked out into the churchyard. It was a few minutes before nine, and both the churchyard and Via Borgoleoni, especially in front of the Guarini School, were already crowded with youngsters. We were leaning against the red facade of the Gesù Church. And as none of our school companions seemed to have noticed us, we’d continued our conversation. For the first time. The event moved me, made me garrulous, and stirred in me a need for friendship.

We began to talk in general about religion, but then he asked me if it was true that we “Israelites” didn’t believe in the Madonna, if it was true that, according to us, Jesus Christ was not the son of God, if we were still expecting the Messiah, if in church we wore caps, and so on. And I replied to all of this, point by point, in a more than affable manner, suddenly feeling that his general, somewhat crude, not to say rude curiosity pleased rather than offended me, and was liberating for me.

At the end, it was I who posed him a question.

“Excuse me,” I said “but you . . . I mean your family . . . have you always been Catholics?”

His lips briefly stretched in a proud smile.

“I would imagine so. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Cattolica is the name of a town, a seaside town near Riccione . . . between Riccione and Pesaro . . . and Jews, as you know, all have the surnames of cities and towns.”

He froze.

“You’re wrong about that,” he had retorted drily, suddenly assuming a knowledgeable air. “It’s true that many Israelites bear the names of cities and towns. But not all. Many are called Levi, Cohen, Zamorani, Passigli, Limentani, Finzi, Contini, Finzi-Contini, Vitali, Algranati and so on. What relevance does that have? I could just as easily cite an infinite number of cases of people with surnames that seemed Jewish, but actually weren’t at all.”

At this point he had begun walking off, still harping on about this topic in an undertone. This let us, for once, slip through the school gates together, and then walk down the long corridor which led to our classroom, and finally to cross the room to reach our desk, each of us keeping pace with the other like the best of friends.

4.

I REMEMBER very well Luciano Pulga’s arrival on the first Monday after lessons began.

Everyone had already taken their places. Mondays would invariably begin with two hours of Guzzo, which were dedicated to class assignments, while he, “the boss,” often liked to idle by the big window at the end of the corridor till almost a quarter past nine, immersed in apparent contemplation of the field that was growing wild at the foot of the Gesù Church’s apse, when, at the doorway, instead of the gigantic form of the teacher, we saw appear the miniscule one of a blond boy, in a green pullover, grey, knee-length short trousers, and long tawny socks. Who was he? Still, as he hovered uncertainly just inside the doorway, casting around his blue eyes, the intense cold blue of mountain ice, in search of a vacant place, I was immediately repelled by his hook nose, and the stick-legged look of someone on stilts, and at the same time moved to pity by his anxiety to find a safe haven. I watched him. Seeing no one next to Giorgio Selmi—Chieregatti was absent that day—he first tried to seat himself in the second desk of the first row. He was blocked. That place was taken—Selmi had quickly warned him—it belonged to someone absent, but who would be back tomorrow or the day after, and would certainly make him move. At which, he instantly stood up again, and moved away. Skinny, with a thin Adam’s apple that trembled, half strangled, a little above his white shirt collar, he halted at the end of the girls’ row, at the very desk which had remained empty since the start of term, when I’d occupied it in my stab at self-exile, and began once more to look around. Once again he walked down the aisle between the second and third rows with a measured and determined step, with the fixed gaze of someone who sees a sanctuary before him. But he was sweating. Droplets of sweat made pearls along the skin above his slightly retracted upper lip. And this detail, the drops of sweat—which I had noticed in a flash as he passed by almost touching me—once again filled me with a vague sense of repulsion.

I also clearly remember what happened when Guzzo returned to the classroom. He, the teacher, subjected the new arrival to a prolonged interrogation. “Good heavens! And who might you be?” he began, “Perhaps a visiting pupil?” The other replied to the despot, “Pulga, Luciano,” displaying an easy, inveigling Italian, that of a traveling salesman, with a markedly Bolognese accent. The class obsequiously rewarded Guzzo’s quips with gusts of laughter; and after a while I came to the aid of the poor creature, guilty of having come to school with nothing more than a fountain pen, not only offering him the regulation sheet of school paper so that he could do the class work, but also, swiftly following Guzzo’s invitation, I made my way to the back row so that “Signor Pulga, Luciano” might avail himself of my dictionary.

And, finally, I remember the odd feeling I had throughout that hour and a half spent side by side with him, with Pulga, the two of us busy trying to solve the puzzle of that Greek translation. Guzzo, while making me change places—“Seeing as you’ve scored top marks by lending him your foolscap,” he’d said, “why not excel yourself by scurrying back to where you came from?”—had given instructions that the dictionary should remain on the desk, visible at all times and placed exactly in the middle to prevent either of us from copying. But Pulga copied away regardless, as and when he wanted. Taking advantage of the teacher’s rare moments of distraction, he cast hasty, greedy, sideways glances over the Schenkl, displaying such perfect technique, I thought, that it must have required years and years of practice, an extensive career. And yet, the way he copied my work with such complete confidence, with such a lack of personal judgement, only keen to perform his own work of plagiarism without error, filled me with a complex, trapped sensation, a mixture of gratification and disgust, against which from then on I found myself defenceless, more or less incapable of any proper reaction.

At the midday break I found him close beside me.

Could I come along with him to some bookshop? he asked me. At the Minghetti School in Bologna which he’d attended, they mostly used different textbooks, so now—as though his father hadn’t forked out enough in moving here!—he’d have to buy almost a whole new set again. A complete disaster. If only he’d been able to acquire them one at a time, perhaps even on credit . . .

Together we went up Via Borgoleoni in the wan January sunlight, and Pulga, meanwhile, respectfully conceding me a place on his right, kept on talking. Despite the fact that Guzzo, during the lesson, had already elicited almost everything about his family and his scholastic curriculum, he chose to repeat, for my sole benefit, that they came from Lizzano in Belvedere, a small mountain town some eighty kilometers from Bologna, where his father, a doctor, had held a practice for almost ten years; that he had gone to primary school in Lizzano, lower ginnasio in Porretta Terme, and started upper ginnasio in Bologna, traveling back and forth on the train every damned day, and finally, that his family, the four of them—father, mother and two boys, because of this unforeseen move “into the Ferrara province”—had fallen into serious difficulties. Just imagine—they didn’t even have a house to live in!

“How come?” I asked, astonished. “You don’t even have a house? So where do you sleep?”

“In the Hotel Tripoli, in that big square behind the castle.”

I knew exactly what sort of hotel the Tripoli was. Rather than a hotel, it was a third-rate restaurant, frequented at midday by farm workers and street hustlers, and in the evening by those my mother would call “women of ill repute.” The bedrooms were situated above, on the first and second floors. And the owner of the locale—small, fat with a bowler tipped back on his crown and a toothpick between his gold-filled teeth, who, in summer, in his shirt sleeves, almost permanently sat by the entrance astride a kitchen stool—rented them out mainly by the hour, keeping the keys in his own pocket.

“True, it’s not one of the finest hotels,” Pulga continued, “and by night”—he sniggered—“it seems to be busy enough. And yet, you know, it’s far from cheap. D’you want to know how much it costs a day for four people for board and lodging?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Fifty lire.”

“Is that a lot?” I asked, uncertain.

“A lot? Do the math: five times four makes twenty. That’s two thousand lire total per month. A fair sum, wouldn’t you say? If you consider that my father, as a local doctor in Coronello, earned a monthly basic salary of only a thousand lire . . . ”

I felt a wave of anxiety.

“And so how do you manage?”

“Well . . . I said a basic salary of a thousand lire. On top of that, though, there are home visits, operations, above all, operations. But even then, in the country, people would prefer to die rather than shell out! Then, take into account competition with the main hospital in Ferrara. Coronella is too close to the city. Ten kilometers is nothing.”

He suddenly stared at me with his steady, ice blue eyes.

“But your father, what does he do?”

“He’s also a doctor,” I said, embarrassed. “But he doesn’t practice.”

“He doesn’t practice?”

“No. Every now and then he pays a home visit, but for free, to friends. A couple of times a year he gets called out farther afield. For circumcisions,” I added with an effort.

He didn’t understand, and turned round to look at me. But he caught on quickly.

“Oh, I see, that’s it . . . So, I guess you live off a private income?

“I think so.”

At the Malfatti Bookshop, in Corso Roma, the textbooks he was searching for were all out of stock. They’d have to be ordered, the assistant explained, and given that the term was already far advanced, they wouldn’t be likely to arrive for a fortnight.

I was expecting this news to disturb him. But he appeared relieved, or so it seemed to me. He dried the droplets of sweat that the heat of the shop had once again formed above his lip with a small handkerchief, and left the assistant with the list of books. He’d call back in a fortnight, he said, then went ahead of me toward the exit.

He wanted to accompany me back to my house. It was nearly one o’clock. I tried to dissuade him, telling him how far away Via Scandiana was, and that if he went along with me he wouldn’t be back at the hotel before two.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he exclaimed, laughing. “The good thing about the restaurant is that you can eat when you want to.”

“You and your family don’t eat together then?”

“Yes, we do . . . at least in theory. But partly because my father returns from the country only in the evening, when he’s finished his clinic, and partly because my mother is always out looking for flats . . . in the end we just eat together at supper and that’s all. That must seem strange to you?”

He looked at me and laughed, jutting his protruding jaw sideways (a sure sign, according to my father, of a “mauvais caractère ”). It was obvious that he envied me, envied me the order, the economic security, the bourgeois stability of my family, but it was clear he felt a slight contempt for me as well.

Perhaps afraid that he might have given himself away, he immediately began to thank me effusively for my help over the class work. If I hadn’t been there to give him a hand—he said—who knows how he’d have been able to manage, and with teachers like Guzzo, it’s obvious, the first impression you give him has enormous importance. But on that subject, why didn’t I ask Guzzo to be transferred, so I could stay in the back row on a permanent basis, or at least until he had got hold of all the textbooks? That Cattolica, whom I shared with, had the look of a very well-behaved, well-brought-up boy. No doubt he’s clever as well, exceptionally so. And yet, it has to be said, he’s not very likeable. Isn’t he perhaps a bit stuck up? His way of behaving, of looking at people, didn’t it have a certain . . .

He interrupted himself.

“I don’t mean to offend you,” he added, scrutinizing me, “perhaps you’re good . . . very close friends?” he asked anxiously.

I avoided his gaze.

“No, not especially,” I replied.

As far as the books were concerned, I continued, he didn’t have to worry, at school I could always lend them to him. But as for moving to sit by him, I wasn’t sure I could do that. I didn’t get on that well with Cattolica, but we’d sat together now for two months, and just to drop him like that . . . all things considered, we were something of a tried and tested partnership.

“But who do you do your homework with? With him?”

“No. I don’t do homework with anyone.”

We had almost arrived. We left Via Madama by Piazza Santa Maria in Vado and turned down Via Scandiana. “What was that kind of barrier down there at the end of the street?” Pulga asked me as he kept on walking, and at the same time pointed toward the mist-covered prow of the Montagnone, at which it seemed Via Scandiana came to a halt.

I stopped in front of the entrance to my house, pressed the bell, and turned round to explain to him what the Montagnone was. But he was already distracted by something else.

“Good heavens!” he exclaimed in a serious tone. “It’s a mansion!”

He stepped back to the center of the street, keeping his gaze directed upward.

“Is it all yours?”

“Yes.”

“It must have heaps of rooms!”

“Quite a few . . . Including the first and second floor, there must be something like fifty.”

“And they’re all taken just by your family?”

“Oh no. We only live in those on the second floor. There are tenants on the first floor.”

“So you and your family live in twenty or so rooms?”

“More or less.”

“But how many of you are there?”

“There are five of us. My father, my mother and us three children: that is me, my brother, Ernesto, and my sister, Fanny. Then you’d have to count the maids.”

“How many of them do you have?”

“Two . . . and then one more who works part time.”

“Twenty rooms! Imagine the cost to heat them. And the tenants?”

At that moment, the latch of the door sprang open. I raised my eyes. My mother was at the window.

“How come you’re so late?” she asked, observing Pulga. “Come on in, your father’s already sitting at the table.”

“Good day, Signora,” said Pulga, bowing slightly.

“Good day.”

“This is a classmate of mine,” I said. “Luciano Pulga.”

“Very nice to meet you,” my mother said, with a smile. “But come in quickly now if you don’t want to make your father angry.”

She withdrew from the windowsill and closed the window. And yet Pulga had still not decided to go. He approached the big double door, gently pushed one of its wings and leaned his head into the opening.

“May I come in for a second?” he asked, turning. “I’d like to have a quick look at the garden.”

He silently walked ahead of me over the threshold while taking off his sports cap. Then, without taking his eyes off the door at the end, open onto the garden, he took another few steps on tiptoe. I watched him. He walked across the huge floor of waxed green and white tiles, with those cautious steps of his, a little stiff-jointed, like a small, solitary marsh bird.

He stopped. He kept looking around with his back turned to me, and in silence.

My lips moved of their own accord. I said:

“Would you like to come back to do your homework with me today?”

5.

MY MOTHER was delighted that I’d made a new friend.

She very much liked Luciano, from that first afternoon. When she came into the study, not only did he stand up, but he even kissed her hand. The gesture won her over utterly. A short while later, in fact, returning with a pot of tea—exceptionally good tea, accompanied by toast, butter, honey and blackcurrant jam and slices of ginger cake—she sat down to join us with this little feast and her dark eyes caressed Luciano with maternal solicitude while she spoke. She had asked about him, his family, his father’s professional duties and, becoming anxious on behalf of his mother—busying herself from morning to night in search of an apartment—she offered any possible assistance to that end. Poor woman! she had sighed. Whatever she needed, she should phone her, please tell her to phone, and she would be more than happy to mobilize not only herself but all her women friends.

“How nice your friend is,” she said later at table. “Yes, he really is polite and well brought up.”

With that emphatic “he ,” she was evidently alluding to Otello Forti, whom she, being jealous, had always found too “coarse” and “sulky.” Irritated, I didn’t reply. It was true—I thought with my eyes fixed on my plate—rather than stay home, I had always preferred to go and study in Via Montebello, at the Fortis’ house. But so what? How was it Otello’s fault that ever since Roncati, the teacher at primary school in Via Bellaria, had placed us next to each other in the first desk of the central row, right in front of the teacher’s podium, I had always preferred studying round at his house? As for hand-kissing and courtly stuff, Otello was an absolute nonstarter. But he was genuine, and sincere, perhaps too sincere . . .

Signora Pulga telephoned, and my mother wasn’t slow in relating what she and that lady had talked about.

In a highly refined voice, wearied but very appealing, the lady was profuse in her thanks. She explained she had already found a house—outside Porta Reno was where it was, along the road out to Bologna, Via Coronella, that is—and so, as far as that was concerned there was no need for any kind soul to trouble herself on their behalf. But her Luciano! How could they ever forget, she and her husband, all that we had been doing to help her Luciano?

“Thank you, my deepest thanks, my dear Signora,” she concluded. “At the moment, no, as we still have to organize the furnishings, and you know how much it costs to keep things in storage, but in a fortnight my husband and I would like permission to intrude on you with another phone call. My Oswald, as a doctor, would also very much like to make the acquaintance of your husband!”

“As a doctor?” my father grumbled, giving a faint, twisted grin, but happy, you could see, as he was whenever anyone remembered the subject in which he’d qualified. “More likely, they’ll be after some money . . . ”

Dr. Pulga was not after money at all, at least not from my father. Some days later, having called round (without his wife) at our house, he immediately made his intentions clear: he had come only to get to know a “colleague” and to have a chat. He then began to talk about himself. He had studied medicine in Modena, between 1908 and 1913. In 1914 he had married. From 1915 to 1917 he had fought on the Carso and in 1918 at Montello. In 1920, “due to a shortage of funds,” he’d had to take on the practice in Lizzano in Belvedere, which, after almost ten years in the most difficult conditions, he’d decided to leave, to take up this practice in Coronella. It was obvious—he’d added—that as far as medicine was concerned Ferrara and Bologna couldn’t even be compared. But leaving aside Coronella’s proximity to Ferrara, the Ferrarese medical establishment didn’t at all seem, as it was in Bologna, to be controlled by a tight little mafia and thus hermetically sealed against any “infliltration.” He himself knew, it could be said, all of the doctors in Bologna, from old Murri to Schiassi, from Nigrisoli to Putti, from Neri to Gasbarrini. He was even a family friend of the surgeon Bartolo Nigrasoli.

Of short stature, with a red face, “cyanotic” and green rolling eyes with a hyperthyroid aspect that glinted behind small lenses, Dr. Pulga—my father declared—wasn’t someone who appealed to him. What a hideous way of talking! To claim to be a friend of this and that person in Bologna, an intimate of half the university and half of Sant’Orsola Hospital, and meanwhile to speak so ill of them, sparing nothing and no one! Bartolo Nigrisoli, for example, perhaps the finest wielder of a scalpel in Italy today, had always been an anti-Fascist. No harm in him remaining faithful to his own views. But to wish, as Dr. Pulga had had the chutzpah to wish, that he be thrown out of the Bologna “school,” where his teaching risked “corrupting” so many youths—and at the same time proclaiming himself a friend of him and his family—my word, that really was a disgrace! And to cap it all, what kind of behavior was it to pay a visit and remain sunk in an armchair from three-thirty till eight? For heaven’s sake, would you get going! If, by chance, Dr. Pulga were to call him on the phone, we had two choices—either tell him he was out or that he was ill in bed and couldn’t move.

But Luciano? What was Luciano like?

The first impression of faint, physical repulsion had certainly remained, and daily familiarity had not erased it. Although he was clean, in both his person and his clothes, there was always something in him that perturbed me: it might have been the droplets of sweat that emerged among the blondish hairs above his upper lip at the slightest emotion, or the blackheads, scattered more or less everywhere on the waxy skin of his face, but denser around the temples and just under his nostrils, or the marked sideways movement of his jaw when he pronounced the “z,” or else, though I’m not sure, the calloused, yellowy hue that strangely covered the palms of his hands, which were thin and oversized, a bit like a hunchback’s. But for all the rest, I have to confess, that, especially in the beginning, his refugee-like humility, his total submissiveness, that of an inferior under protection, gave me an almost inebriated sense of satisfaction. In essence, my relations with Otello had never been so easy. He accepted my superiority, but made me pay for it in countless ways: with his continual muttering, with his mulish stubbornness—if, for instance, he came to my house, and that happened rarely enough, he’d always do so sighing with ill grace. And here we had a fellow of a very different stripe, for whom my house (he even told me so that very first day when I took him on a room-by-room tour of the apartment) was the most beautiful, welcoming and comfortable place he’d ever seen in his life, my mother the nicest and kindest mother of all, and myself a kind of prodigy of cleverness and brilliance, with regards to homework, an oracle before whom he could only listen in silence and awe. Although he was neither stupid nor inept—for in the question-and-answer sessions to which he was subjected for a whole month by all the teachers, from Guzzo to Krauss, from Bianchi to Razzetti, and “that one” who taught history and philosophy, he had always defended himself tooth and nail (and, however reluctantly, even Mazzanti had been unable to award him a lower mark than five)—he left me free to unravel the knotty passages, dictate aloud whatever I decided was right, and when I’d finished, limiting himself—while he was still writing it down in his notebook in his big, neat, slightly angular, feminine hand—to exclamations of applause, such as “Bravo!” “What a knockout!” “I’ve never seen anyone translate Greek so well!” “Lucky sod!” How relaxing, I would say to myself, what an easy life it is for Luciano Pulga! What a difference between him, who never needed to contribute (in practice, it was I alone who translated, so that if my mother had approached on tiptoe to eavesdrop behind the door—nor was it impossible that she did so, as I had heard the parquet creak in the next room more than once—she would have heard only one voice holding forth, mine), what a difference between him and Otello, who, whenever he opened his mouth, it was to play the contrarian or devil’s advocate! But leaving Otello aside, if I’d managed, as at a certain point I was hoping to, to enter and be part of Cattolica’s circle, imagine what a struggle I’d have had! The rivalry that divided us at school, sharpened by the irremovable presence of his two cronies, Boldini and Grassi, would certainly have continued round at his place. At Cattolica’s house, yes: as for where we’d go to study, there would have been no discussion. Either his place or solitude, take it or leave it . . .

Luciano would arrive every afternoon around four o’clock, and wouldn’t leave before seven-thirty or eight. Yet it’s not as if we were always working. Besides the half hour for tea, every now and then we’d stop to chat. This was always up to Luciano to decide, for it was he, suddenly energetic and commanding, who would impose those brief pauses which my poor, tired brain had need of, just as, later, when he considered that I was sufficiently rested and relaxed, he would spur me on to further labors.

During the intervals, he did everything to entertain me, distract me, even amuse me. He was greatly in debt to me—for the protection I’d offered him from the first day, the books that I was still lending him, the hospitality of my home, the homework that, essentially, I did for him. And he therefore—he seemed to be saying—repaid me with the modest, but perhaps not contemptible gift of his presence and with his spectator’s role of egging me on. It wasn’t much. Little enough, that was true. But of one thing I could be sure—there was nothing more he was able to give.

He was careful not to boast about anything. Very often he would declare that he was without any ambitions, happy to remain confined within the limbo of “those who are suspended between a five and a six,”^‡ as, he would add with a smile, standing out in one way or another, for good or for bad, one ended up “paying the price.” It was as if he were saying, “I know I don’t count for much—no, for even less than that.” And yet the way he talked to me about school, for example, putting Mazzanti’s fairness in doubt—he was sure that between me and Cattolica, he shamelessly favored Cattolica—or making me aware that down there, from the back row—a lowly position, to be sure, yet not without some advantages—he was afforded a much clearer and more objective vision of the whole class than I could have, involved as I was in the struggle, the competition, in the glorious but also petty daily slog of coming out on top: in every phrase of his I could perceive his determination to be useful to me, even indispensable.

Confident that it would please me, he never missed an opportunity to speak ill of Cattolica.

In his view, Cattolica was nothing but a conceited bighead. Leaving aside the present company, how could I really compare the intelligence of Boldini with Cattolica’s, or even that of Giorgio Selmi? The fact was that Boldini didn’t want to come out on top—even being an underdog was a vocation!—and even less than that would do for Selmi, who aspired to nothing more than an average of seven. A plodder like Chiereghatti, though better organized and cannier—that was all Cattolica basically was! And, in fact, Guzzo, who was by no means stupid, and didn’t let himself be dazzled, like Krauss and Razzetti, by mere feats of memory, when he sought out an answer a little out of the ordinary, usually left Cattolica well alone, and knew who to turn to . . . True, I wasn’t especially well disposed to scientific subjects, or to be more precise I only applied myself in subjects I liked—Italian, Latin, Greek etc. But it would just have needed a little effort on my part—only last year in the math retake exam hadn’t I passed with a good eight?—and he was willing to bet that even in math, in physics and in natural sciences that “Signor” Cattolica would be made to bite the dust.

“No, really, I don’t think so.” I weakly warded off the compliment. “I’ve never been any good at math.”

“You’ve never been any good at it because you’ve never wanted to be.”

“Maybe. But isn’t that the same thing in the end?”

“It isn’t the same thing. Being able is one thing, wanting to is another.”

“In my opinion, it’s a question of the grey matter, of the brain’s development just not being adapted to it.”

When I threw out that phrase with a smile, Luciano jumped up in protest. For me, of all people, to argue such a thing!

The way he looked at me, serious, intense, and at the same time respectful, I understood that he was awaiting my permission to remind me of the mathematical genius of my race—my father too, with an excellent head for figures, was convinced that we Jews were the best mathematicians in the world, attributing my scarce aptitude seriously enough to the peasant blood of my grandmother Maria. I pretended not to understand and let the topic drop.

But he was right, and bit by bit he was becoming indispensable to me. With that in mind, I remember one afternoon toward the end of February when, because of the snow, he was late for our meeting.

Unexpectedly, the snow had begun to fall in the morning, around nine thirty. How beautiful and moving it was to see from inside the classroom, the small silent flakes as they slowly fell against the blackish background of the Church of Gesù, and then, on leaving, to find Via Borgoleoni entirely mantled in white. It caused the usual festivities. At the school gates, a big snowball fight broke out, during which Luciano and I had utterly lost sight of each other, but it didn’t matter, as it was understood that at four o’clock we would meet up as usual.

After lunch, rather than abating, the snowfall became heavier. At five, oddly uneasy, I was already wondering if Luciano would have been able to make his way on foot from the remote district of Foro Boario as far as Via Scandiana. Perhaps today he might not manage it—I said to myself, looking out the window. Perhaps it would be better if I started my studies alone.

I sat down at the desk with my notebook and with the textbook open before me, but I couldn’t concentrate. The Pulgas still needed to install a telephone at their house. Yet if Luciano had really meant not to come, it was reasonable to suppose he could all the same have found some way of warning me, bothering to walk to the chemist’s fifty meters away to phone me. Whenever there was any urgent need, the Pulgas made use of that facility. He had told me so himself.

At a quarter past five, I stood up again, and went to the window once more. Outside it was already dark. And if I were to go to Luciano’s house? Besides, that would only be fair.

I opened the window. I leaned out, breathed the air and looked down. The snow continued falling, but more feebly now, reduced to a kind of dust dancing weightlessly around the yellowish streetlamps. Down in the street an immaculate blanket of snow, compact and even, had covered and softened every protuberance. Neither the cobbles nor the curbs could be distinguished anymore.

And then, down there, while my heart was beating madly, beating with a joy mixed as ever with its opposite, I suddenly made out Luciano himself, as he swiftly slipped inside the gate at that very moment.

6.

IN THE early days, to amuse me, Luciano had recourse to two equally inexhaustible repertoires: he told jokes in Bolognese dialect or he dredged up memories from his childhood. These were also comic. They were all centered on Lizzano in Belvedere and the mountain villages thereabout—Poretta, Vidiciatico, Madonna dell’Acero, Corno alle Scale: names which quickly became familiar to me, and invariably figured himself as the main character, including those stories which referred to his father, his mother or his brother Nando. The role he reserved for himself never changed. It was always that of the sly operator, the clever and quick-witted trickster, deft not only with his mind but also his hands and feet. Perhaps they were only pure inventions and fantasies, but I enjoyed them no less for that. I laughed as if I was watching a farce by Ridolini or Charlie Chaplin. Luciano, too, seemed happy enacting them and pleased by their success.

Later there was a change.

It happened by chance, I’d say, one evening in March when a violent storm broke out, and from then on, the nature of his talk completely altered.

At seven o’clock I saw him stand up.

“Are you going?”

“I think I ought to.”

“Don’t you want to stay for supper? If you’d like I’ll go and tell my mother.”

He stared at me. He was already tying up his books with his belt, but he paused.

“Thanks, thanks a lot . . . ” he stammered, shifting his lower jaw to the side more than ever. “But I don’t want to be any bother.”

“What d’you mean? I’ll go tell her now.”

I got up and rushed toward the door.

“Wait a moment!”

I turned. Standing up by the table lamp, he seemed paler than usual, with his blue eyes deeply in shadow in his little bony face, while the base of his aquiline nose and bulbous forehead stood out in the light.

“No, don’t bother. They’re expecting me at home.”

I argued that it wouldn’t take much to ring the chemist’s near his house.

“Alright, that’s fine, but after supper . . . ” he said in an unconvinced tone, still staring hard at me, “I won’t be able to stay overnight.”

I hesitated.

“Why not?” it cost me to ask, turning toward the table. “We could easily put up a camp bed in my room.”

He didn’t reply. He walked to the window and looked out.

“Is it still raining?” I asked.

“It’s eased off a bit.”

He moved back to the center of the room and sat down in the armchair.

“All things considered, it was much better when we were staying at the Hotel Tripoli,” he said. “Living in the Foro Boario area will be fine in summer, but in winter it’s worse than Lizzano. It must be the new built walls, but you’ve no idea how cold it gets, and how damp.”

I asked if they didn’t have radiators.

The question was unimportant. And yet when I was asking it, something warned me I was straying into a danger zone. I suddenly felt that we were sliding toward an intimacy which till then we’d kept at a distance, an intimacy which I had to avoid at any price.

But it was too late. Luciano was already explaining how his father, instead of the central heating whose installation remained beyond their financial possibilities for now, had bought two terracotta Becchi stoves. That kind of heater worked perfectly well, on condition, it’s clear, that the pipes go directly upward. Instead his father, “stubborn thickhead” that he’d always been, had decided one day that the pipes should be laid crossways from room to room, halfway up the wall. The result: you just had to light a piece of paper and the whole house immediately filled with smoke. So, you die of asphyxiation!

I was shocked by that “stubborn thickhead,” by the abandonment of every reserve and caution on his part. What had happened? I wondered, fearfully. What was happening?

Despite recalling the very negative impression Dr. Pulga had made on my father, I tried to take up his defence. Useless. Luciano only redoubled his attacks. Not only was his father a thickhead—he repeated—but a miser and violent to boot. I let him talk on. When he came home in a bad mood, his first instinct was to take it out on his family. He often ended up hitting every one of them.

Were these, too, inventions and fantasies? They might have been. On the other hand, it wasn’t the truth that mattered, even here. What mattered was the altered tone in which he spoke to me, the unexpected crudeness, without any tact, the ill mannered bitterness in his voice.

“Really?” I said breathlessly. “He hits your mother as well?”

“Oh, it’s mainly her that he hits, the scumbag!” Luciano replied. And yet—he added, grinning—it was obviously her, “wretch” that she was, who wanted to be hit. In essence, his mother liked to be beaten: that was the actual truth. And he, his father, who had understood that perfectly, he kept her happy. As best he could.

He burst out laughing.

“The mysteries of the human heart!” he exclaimed. “What d’you think, that it’s only men who are disgusting? Women are too, you can be sure of that, women too!”

Aside from the radiators chugging away at full throttle, the Hotel Tripoli—he went on—was better even in that respect because it offered an accurate picture of things, of life as it really was “without sugaring the pill.” Had I ever seen the owner, that pig with a German name, Müller, always sitting there, on the ground floor behind the restaurant till? The couples who came in to “have a little afternoon siesta” didn’t even have to stop to eat something. All they had to do was stride past the tables straight up to him, and he, without the slightest pause, would just hand over the key. What a laugh, though, to see some of the couples that turned up! Usually, country folk, with the “cheap whores” who had picked the yokels up in the square. But sometimes, it was a youngster from the city, who’d come in for a quick reconnaissance, take the key and disappear upstairs, to be followed a minute or so later by the girl, the “chick,” who would slip in “all guilty looking.” Chick? Hardly! Often enough it was more like a “fat old hen,” a forty year-old, a mother, perhaps even a grandmother, sweating sin from every pore of her leathery face. These were the “consorts” of engineers, of lawyers, of doctors—recognizable as such at first glance. Women from the best society, in short, who would be quite capable of displaying themselves from the height of their box in the town theater that very evening as if nothing had happened, or boldly prancing about for the crowd and swaying their backsides along Viale Cavour the day after. God’s truth, it was a total joke!

The alarm clock on the table showed it was seven thirty. The parquet in the adjoining room creaked. My mother leaned in at the door and observed us with satisfaction.

“Have you finished yet?” she asked.

Lost in reverie, I looked at her. Yes—I confirmed—we’ve just finished.

With his usual promptitude, Luciano had leaped to his feet.

“Poor thing!” my mother commiserated. “To have to go by foot all the way past the docks in all this rain. Do you have an umbrella? And galoshes? If you’d like to stay for supper, you only have to say.”

“Thanks a lot, Signora,” Luciano replied, “but as I was just saying to him”—he nodded at me—“I’d prefer not to. If my mother and father don’t see me come back . . . well, they’ll be annoyed, you know how it is.”

My mother insisted. It would be simple to phone to ask their permission. But Luciano wouldn’t be persuaded. They spoke, he standing beside the armchair, more suave and saccharine than ever, she in the doorway, enfolding him in the caress of her dark-eyed gaze. Remaining seated, I watched one and then the other. I followed the movements of their lips, but most of their words I couldn’t understand or hear.

At last my mother withdrew.

“I tell you it’s a total joke,” Luciano resumed in a lowered tone, as soon as he’d assured himself with a glance that the door was properly shut, “the way they behave—it’s fun to watch, mainly it’s a laugh.”

It’s like the sleaziest port, he continued, the Hotel Tripoli by night! He slept with his brother Nando, who fell so fast asleep, as soon as he was under the covers, not even a bombardment would wake him, because of which he heard nothing—the “poor innocent!”—neither the quarrels that broke out in the adjoining room between their parents every night before they went to bed—quarrels that ended often enough in furious blows—nor the noises of every kind that filtered through the paper-thin wall on the other side. They’d “go to work” flat out, over there. All night there’d be shudders, sighs, creaking springs—a complete disaster if you wanted a wink of sleep. But who even thought of sleeping? Only that meek little mouse of a Nando. As for him, it didn’t even cross his mind to go to sleep. He’d be there till the small hours in his nightshirt, his ear glued to the wall, wide awake and alert as could be, checking out when different voices announced “a changing of the guard.” Some nights in the next-door room there were as many as five different couples, one after another. Every now and then he’d get up and watch.

“And watch?”

“That’s right. Through the keyhole of the communicating door.”

“And what could you see?”

“What could I see? Oh . . . sadly, I wasn’t always able to because the bed was placed right behind the keyhole and besides, it was really high, you know that type of double bed. But I glimpsed something, you can be sure of that.”

For example, once, he continued, he had seen someone’s back looming up above the headboard. It was a woman’s, moving up and down, “Hup! Hup!” just as if she were riding a trotting horse. Another time he’d seen a couple walking around the room stark naked, so that every so often they’d be in range of the keyhole showing “their fronts and their backsides.” On another occasion, a couple, instead of using the bed, had preferred to make love on the floor, very close to the door. And if that time, however desperately he’d strained his eye to look down, he hadn’t managed to see a thing, as a recompense he’d been able to hear, which was perhaps even better.

“Better?”

“You bet it was! More than the sighs, the stifled cries, you should have heard the words they said to each other. Juicy stuff! It went on and on.”

At that moment, the maid entered. She told us dinner was on the table, so Luciano was forced to interrupt his tale and leave.

But in the following days, taking more and more time off from our homework, it was he who kept returning to this kind of talk. I was weak, passive, unable to react, and he made the most of it.

He told me, among other things, that he was reading an amazing book, Aphrodite, by Pierre Louÿs: doubly amazing, he explained, for its literary achievement and its “highly instructive” contents. He recounted how he’d had to read it, just a few pages at a time, mainly at night, with one hand ready to turn the page and the other no less ready to accompany the salient points of the story with “a vigorous royal wave.”

“Will you lend it to me?” I asked.

“What?” he replied with a grin. “The book?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know . . . if we’re talking of the book,” he went on, looking hard at me with his enamel-blue eyes, “I’m not sure I can. My father guards his tomes jealously. It’s a passion of his!”

To get his “paws on” this or any other book of equal interest which his father kept on a special shelf in his study, under surveillance—he continued—he would generally have to wait until night time, when everyone was asleep, taking great care to put everything back as it was. With this “trick” he had been able to read nearly all of Pigrilli’s novels, The Garden of Punishments by a French author whose name he’d forgotten, Weininger’s Sex and Character, and The Betrothed, not obviously the one by Manzoni, which in the fourth and fifth year we’d already had up to here, but those other betrotheds written about by my “co-religionist,” Da Verona, who were infinitely more worthwhile in his opinion. In any case, he added, raising a hand to forestall any possible protest on my part, in any case Aphrodite by the “said” Louÿs beat every one of those other books hands down. Did I want to know what was described in the first part of the novel? It described a garden, the one that surrounded the goddess’s temple, where scores of women coupled “in every imaginable way both with men and with each other.” And they invented innumerable ways and positions for doing this, so that even he, who, all modesty aside, had a fair knowledge of such things, was left with his mouth agape.

Till then I had never masturbated. When Luciano learned this, he was astonished. How’s that possible? At my age! Since he was ten he’d always masturbated at least once a day.

“But doesn’t it do any harm?”

“Harm!? On the contrary, it does you nothing but good. It’s possible,” he said smilingly, “that doing it too much might wear out the memory a bit. But conversely, it broadens the mind incredibly.”

In his view, there was nothing better to develop the “intellectual faculties.” Of course, one shouldn’t go overboard, the same way you shouldn’t drink to excess or, say, overindulge in sports. And yet it was good for you. It was a normal and natural “practice,” and Nature, if one knew how to interpret “scientifically” the impulses it instilled in us, wouldn’t give us such impulses to harm us. But was it possible circumcision had blunted my “sexual proclivities”? Had I ever had any erections? And at night had I ever had any “wet dreams”?

I replied as best I could, admitting everything, even when I hadn’t properly understood: which was to say that yes, often in the most unexpected moments, my “thing” got hard, and that one or two mornings I’d woken with my nightshirt covered with wet patches.

One afternoon Luciano unbuttoned his short trousers and showed me his member. He presumed that I would then do the same. I had always been extremely shy and so refused. But he insisted and I ended up doing as he asked.

He inspected it carefully, leaning a little forward, with the dispassionate air of a doctor. “So that’s all a circumcision is?”—he burst out laughing. He’d always believed it was a fairly serious operation. It was really nothing, he could now see well enough. In the end, what was the big difference between his and mine?

He unbuttoned himself again to verify.

It went on like this until Easter, with the continual feeling on my part of being impelled step by step toward something unknown and threatening, but without anything in particular ever happening. Luciano talked and talked. His voice held me suspended; shut me up in its low, resonant spirals.

I have few precise memories of that period. I lived as though in an underground tunnel—unable to see the end of it, but fearing that I would suddenly find myself up against it. I recall a sense of abject complicity, which rose in me every time my mother came in. And I also recall one afternoon during the Easter holidays, perhaps not even an actual afternoon, but only one that I dreamed.

I had gone to play soccer on the Spianata behind the Aquaduct with half of the class. We began around two o’clock, happy to run on the dry grass burnt by the winter frosts till we were out of breath, and happy to have shed our heavy clothes. The lovely sunlight lit up even the dark bell towers of the military storehouses, gave a shine to the mossy marble of the statue of Pope Clement, usually so melancholic and lonesome-looking, and gilded the blue distance of the first houses on Via Ripagrande and Via Piangipane. Around three, Luciano came along as well, on foot, of course. Like Cattolica, he wasn’t particularly keen to play, and besides he was too skinny, too puny, and no one wanted him on their team. Stamping his feet to warm them up, he was left on the sidelines as a spectator. While we were playing, every now and then we’d hear his commentary—applause, or hissing and jeering. Every time I looked at him, he seemed to be smiling—I guessed at, rather than saw, the grin on his pallid little mug. And I knew why he was staying there. For me. After the match finished he’d want to perch on the handlebars of my bike and to steer it as far as Via Garibaldi, to the corner of Via Garibaldi and Via Colomba, where with perfect ease we could spy on the men who entered and left through the little nailed doors of the brothels.

It was almost dusk. And then, just as we were about to pack in the game, I fell and hurt my knee. Nothing serious, I knew that perfectly well, but still I took some time to get up, in short, making “a bit of a scene,” I lay there with my eyes shut, my aching limbs suffused, little by little, with an extraordinary sense of wellbeing, glad that the match had ended because of this accident, and glad that three or four friends gathered round me were making gentle attempts to set me on my feet. In the pungent evening air, above my outstretched body, I could hear their lulled voices, and I wanted never to get up.

“Give over, it’s not as if he’s dead,” someone finally said. “Can’t you see he’s just hamming it up? Come on, let’s go and get changed.” I heard their steps moving away and half opened my eyes. I peeked through lowered lashes. Standing in silence beside me—and huge when seen from below, coldly observing me from head to toe as if I was a mere thing—no one remained but Luciano.

7.

THE DAY before term began I fell ill with tonsillitis.

I had suffered from that from earliest childhood—that was why my Aunt Malvina was so keen to take me on visits to the Church of San Biagio, protector of the weak-throated. But that year the inflammation seemed more acute than usual. It was caused by an abscess, my father declared, and my Uncle Giacomo, immediately called in by my mother, was of the same opinion.

To operate or not to operate?

Often in agreement as far as the diagnosis was concerned, my father and my uncle always quarrelled about the treatment. And so, to resolve the eternal dispute at my bedside between the two doctors of the family (my father favored intervening, my uncle not), my mother thought it best to telephone the throat specialist, Dr. Fadigati. It had been Fadigati who had operated on my tonsils when I was a baby. To placate my uncle, they had only been partly removed. No one, then, was better placed than he to decide on the best treatment . . .

Fadigati arrived, examined my throat, confirmed the diagnosis. As for the treatment, he too, like my uncle, held the view that, for now, with this temperature I had, a “little incision” might be dangerous. We needed to wait. Around the seventh or eighth day, we’d have a better idea whether to make the most of the occasion—here, the doctor, who was already smiling at me, stretched out his hand and stroked my cheek—finally to be rid of “the whole works.”

There was no need for that. The fever broke on its own. It was true that the two tonsil stumps might cause trouble if they were left there, but once again the decision was made to take no further action. They might, however, discuss the issue further in June, before we left for the seaside.

I breathed a sigh of relief. And yet I wasn’t happy, or, rather, I was made uneasy by the anticipated recovery which would hasten my return to school. I thought nervously about Luciano. He’d only visited me once. He’d turned up on the second or third day, when I still had a very high fever. Seated composedly by my bedside, even during the brief times when my mother left the room, he spoke of nothing but school matters: which verse they’d got up to in translating The Iliad, which of Horace’s Odes Guzzi had set us, what Krauss was currently teaching, and so on. I kept quiet and listened. At a certain point, speaking with some difficulty, I had asked him if, by chance, given that I was ill, he hadn’t thought of doing his homework round at someone else’s house? To which he’d replied, smiling affectionately, no, it hadn’t crossed his mind “to two time” me. What did I take him for? A Judas? Rather than worry about that, I should make every effort to recover. As soon as I got better—as far as the schedule went I shouldn’t worry: clever as I was, I’d catch up in a jiffy—we would resume our “expert tandem team.” And it was precisely this last prospect which, in the following days, filled me with an obscure reluctance. School and Luciano. Returning to the first meant continuing with the second also.

Continuing with Luciano. But what would that really mean?

In bed, convalescent, I abandoned myself to strange thoughts without restraint. Again and again, I paced through the dark tunnel of the last months, from that morning on which Luciano had first appeared at the door of the classroom until, conversation by conversation, we had begun to “bite the bullet,” as he called it. I knew well enough how it had come about. It had all hung on my question about the central heating. The rest, including the mutual display of our penises, had quickly followed on its own from that. I saw the whole scene again. After he had got me to undress, Luciano had leaned forward to examine me, while adopting an impassive expression, but at the same time seeming a bit disappointed. Was it possible, he seemed to be thinking, that I who was so much more stocky, robust and sporty than him, was so small in that department? And when he in turn had unbuttoned himself—I could never have guessed that a skinny guy like him would be hiding such a disproportionate thing in his trousers—swollen, white, but above all huge—seeing it, I had felt an uncontrollable sense of disgust grip me in the stomach. Disgust, revulsion. If I continued seeing Luciano, every minute spent with him would be steeped in that revulsion. Latin and Greek would be a walk in the park compared to that!

And if I were to ditch him? If, offering some excuse, I were to get him off my back?

At home, that maneuver might perhaps have worked without hindrance. I would only need to tell some fib, letting Luciano be the one who had made the first move that led to the break up, or to invent some quarrel. My mother would almost certainly be consoled by the crucial fact that I kept on doing my homework at home. But at school it wouldn’t have been anything like as easy. Even though I had always been a bit ashamed in front of the others of my friendship with Luciano—up there in Krauss’s class, unfortunately, we sat next to each other, but when Mazzanti, before giving him a mark, felt obliged to consult me, most often I didn’t reply, annoyed and shrugging my shoulders—all the same, everyone knew that he came round to my place to study every afternoon. Then there was Cattolica. There was also Giorgio Selmi. Cattolica had always pretended not to notice my partnering up with that “arse-licker Pulga”—as Luciano was referred to within the exclusive circles of the ex-A section. He had never given me the satisfaction of mentioning it, so that if I were now to break with Luciano his triumph would be too prodigious, too overwhelming, too hard to bear. As for Giorgio Selmi, who recently in gym—Luciano was exempted because of a weakness due to pleurisy in childhood—had had the hypocrisy to come up and complain to me about being on his own and had proposed I share a desk with him next year; he too needed to be kept at a distance. To break with Luciano now, all of a sudden, would be to give him too swift a victory, to drop my trousers in front of him as well.

I went back to school, and immediately after, Luciano began coming round to my house once again.

I had been off school for rather too long and therefore had to make up the lost time, so that it was easy to keep him in line for the first few days: I imposed my authority—“Let’s cut the chatter.” Yet I knew that soon enough we would once again broach those old topics, oh how well I knew it! There was the vaguely sardonic expression in the depths of Luciano’s eyes as confirmation of this; and, even more, there were some imperceptible changes in his behavior—for instance, the way he was much less adulatory toward me, the way he allowed himself periods of distraction which would have been inconceivable earlier on, his humming in a low voice, waiting, while I beavered away at a sentence not perhaps as tricky as I was pretending it was. “Right, go ahead then, if it really means so much to you,” he seemed to be saying. “But does it really? Don’t think I can’t guess what you too would really prefer to concentrate on.”

All the same, one afternoon something new happened.

I had gone to a lesson at the gym some way off in Via Praòsolo, after which I’d agreed with Luciano that we would meet up at my house around six. At the end of the lesson, one of our classmates, leaving the gym, had brought out a rubber soccer ball, and then a game immediately kicked off in the huge courtyard in front. Rather than a game, it was a tangled series of scuffles without head or tail, but still. The absolute prohibition—that I should not sweat—the same one that a little earlier, during the gym lesson, had forced me to sit it out on a little bench, returned, to fill me with a searing, aching envy. With my back propped against the surrounding wall which separated the courtyard from Via Praòsolo, I kept watching the others running around, jumping, shouting, sweating, and, more than ever, I felt like a social reject, a weakling, a wretch, in every way deserving to end up with Luciano Pulga as my only companion.

I wasn’t alone, though.

Cattolica was there too. Instead of sauntering off home as was his wont, he’d stopped to watch. He too was leaning against the wall, and had lit a cigarette without saying a word. But suddenly he approached me, and most unexpectedly, slipped his arm under mine.

“It annoys you not being able to play, doesn’t it?” he said with sympathy.

I replied truthfully that I really wanted to, but that unfortunately I couldn’t. For some time, I’d been ill—I added unnecessarily—and my father, who was a doctor, had wanted me not to get hot and sweaty on any account.

Cattolica stood listening to me patiently and attentively. A fair bit taller than me, he listened with his head tilted a little forward—a characteristic posture for him when something or someone interested him.

“Perhaps it’s an indiscreet question,” he finally said, “but what was the illness you had? I haven’t been following the daily bulletins of Pulga,” he added ironically. “I thought he mentioned a sore throat.”

Daily bulletins? And Luciano hadn’t shown his face more than that once, nor, strangely, had he even telephoned to find out how I was!

“I had an abscess,” I replied.

He furrowed his brow.

“Is it painful?”

“Fairly.” I smiled, staring at him. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies.”

He blinked.

“Sorry to hear that,” he said. “If I’d known, I too would have come round to see you.”

Despite that “too,” my heart began beating fast. Cattolica round at my house! The poignant image of him, the repentant and sympathetic rival, beside my sickbed, formed in my mind. But I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t trust him.

“It hurt like hell,” I said, “especially the first few days. It looked as though they’d have to cut it out. Then luckily the abscess burst on its own . . . It’s likely they’ll have to operate on my tonsils. Not now, but in June, before we go to the seaside.”

We kept up the conversation like this, standing next to each other, for a good ten more minutes. Although Cattolica had meanwhile unlinked his arm from mine, all the same I felt his presence, his closeness. What did he want, I asked myself? And it made me doubly uneasy: both on account of what he might want and of the obligation that it put on me, to cut a good figure, to act with dignity.

“You live round here, don’t you?” he asked at a certain point.

Yes. In Via Scandiana. Close by the Palazzo Schifanoia. Have you ever seen the Schifanoia frescoes?”

“No. Two or three weeks ago, I went as far as Santa Maria in Vado. We live near the station. In Via Cittadella.”

“Oh yes?”

“It’s a very nice area,” Cattolica went on with the indomitable confidence he usually showed when speaking about anything concerning himself. “Brand-new . . . modern . . . “

He interrupted himself. “Listen—why not come round to my place today to do your homework?”

I turned to look him in the face.

“To your house!”

#x201C;Why not?”

He was smiling, chuffed at having made me gawp.

“Call in at your house, collect your books and then come round. 16, Via Cittadella. How long would it take on your bike? Ten minutes, more or less.”

“Thanks a lot . . . But, sorry, don’t you do your homework with Boldini and Grassi?”

“Of course,” he replied with the air of a gambler who, seeing he’s been beaten, shows his cards. “But what does that matter?”

“Oh, not at all . . . Only that if there’s already three of you, a fourth would be a crowd.”

He straightened his back and looked away.

He then replied that, on the contrary, one more wouldn’t make any difference; it would be far from crowded. In his room, there was a huge table, so big—he smiled with pride—that if you wanted to, you could seat the whole class around it—“the girls as well.” And then—he went on—Boldini and Grassi, he could assure me, would have nothing against me joining them, nothing against me, they three had studied together for years now . . .

He turned to look at me.

“You understand,” he said in conclusion.

I had understood only too well. Between Boldini and Grassi on one side and me on the other, he would have to choose them, his old companions, his faithful courtiers and yes-men. Besides, it was similarly obvious and undeniable that between his house and mine, it was his house, his room, his table that I, too, needs must prefer. My house, whatever it might contain, was a place in the city that he, from Via Cittadella, wouldn’t dream of considering as something definite, something that actually existed, with a roof, under which I and my family happened to live. And that “ass-licker Pulga” who came round every day to my house? He, too, didn’t exist; Luciano too was an abstract being, who could be ignored, a futile, irksome topic on which it wasn’t worth squandering a single word.

“Yes, I understand, and thanks,” I replied. “But, look, today it’s not feasible. Pulga’s coming round to my house, and there’s no way of rearranging . . . If only I could phone him . . . ”

“Doesn’t he have a telephone?”

“Not yet. He lives a long way off in the Foro Boario area, beyond the Docks, and to get him on the phone’s a nightmare. You have to call a chemist near his house. But better not, there’s a good chance the man will get annoyed. And anyway, it’s late. As he doesn’t have a bike, it’s likely he’ll be on his way already.”

Without saying more, we made our way toward the exit. At the door, we paused, still undecided. I had to go to the left, and he to the right.

“Well, bye, then,” he said coldly, extending his hand.

“Aren’t you waiting for Boldini and Grassi?”

“No. Those two are on their bikes. I’m taking the tram.”

“Unless . . . ” I resumed, without letting go of his hand, “ . . . unless I could bring him along too. I could go home first, ask him, then we could come together.”

That would solve the problem—I thought, looking searchingly into his eyes with ill concealed anxiety. All things considered, that would solve the problem splendidly. For me, anyway.

“Can I bring him along?”

“Him who?” Cattolica said with a scornful grimace, withdrawing his hand. “Pulga?”

“Didn’t you just say that your table was so big? So, if there would be four of us, then . . . “

He reacted confusedly.

“No way. Five of us! And Pulga to boot! You must be joking?”

“Joking why?” I replied very coolly. “What’s so wrong with Pulga that you people have to treat him like he has the plague?”

I was deeply offended and wanted him to know it.

“He’s been coming round to my place every day since January, and I can’t see any sign I’ve caught it from him.”

But Cattolica was right—I couldn’t help thinking, even while I was still speaking. Luciano really did have the plague, and by having been so close to him, he’d infected me with it too.

Cattolica sighed.

“De gustibus. You are free as can be to invite anyone you want to your house. I repeat: if you want to come round to mine, fine, but him, no. Never. Not a chance!”

“Well . . . if that’s how it is,” I murmured in a trembling voice, near to tears as I was, “I’m sorry, but it’s either both of us or neither.”

8.

THAT EVENING Cattolica and I parted brusquely, or rather it was him who uttered a terse “goodbye,” turned his back, and hurried off toward Corso Giovecca. But, the morning after, he returned determinedly and insistently to the fray. Without once alluding to the strange conversation we’d had, he did his utmost, I couldn’t help noticing, to remove the invisible barrier that had separated us till then.

It wasn’t as if he ever turned round during lessons. His gaze, as ever, fixed immovably on the teacher seated in front of the class, he continued to show me his finely carved profile, covering his mouth with his hand opened like a fan, whispering under the shadow of his fingers. He was too zealous and disciplined, too attached to his reputation as a model pupil—in regard to behavior as well—to dispense with these basic precautions. And yet I realized that the perfect straightness of his neck and body, which I effortfully tried to imitate, was dedicated not as much to the eyes in front of him as to the more dangerous eyes, because they lay outside his control, of whoever was behind him. If Luciano, back there from his desk by the wall, had realized that there was no longer the former coldness between me and Cattolica, and that we even spoke to each other, continuously, he would perhaps have been able to guess the topic of our whispering. It was absurd from my perspective. I certainly felt guilty enough toward Luciano to sense, almost physically, the icy touch of his blue, interrogating irises on the back of my neck.

Imagine my astonishment the morning that Guzzo himself turned in surprise toward Cattolica.

He was scanning aloud a Catullus poem, the one that begins: “Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus . . . ”^§

He stopped suddenly, and in a muted tone gave the order:

“Cattolica, continue.”

“Me?” asked Cattolica, astonished, touching his chest.

“Indeed. None other,” confirmed Guzzo, whose anger generally induced him to slip into Tuscan dialect. “Carry on scanning the line, my dear chap. Let’s see how you manage.”

Cattolica began, breathlessly, to flick through the book, which was open, but not at the right page. Who knows how long his torment would have lasted—motionless at the far side of the desk I didn’t dare help him—if, at last, from behind, Malagù’s raised hand hadn’t come to his aid. “Well done, Malagù,” Guzzo remarked. “I’m delighted that you are following, that the good Catullus is of interest even to you . . . But you, Cattolica, tell me: does he not interest you, is he not to your taste, perhaps?”

“No . . . it’s not . . . ” stammered Cattolica, very pale in the face, slowly getting to his feet.

“No?” Guzzo responded, with a grin.

He arched his thick eyebrows which stood at the base of his vast, Wagnerian forehead like two grey circumflexes—being an atheist, a “pagan,” as he had boasted on innumerable occasions, he never lost the chance to make fun of those whom, like Camurri, or indeed Cattolica, he suspected of belonging to clerical families.

“Passer deliciae meae puellae,”^¶ he declaimed softly, while winking at the rest of the class. “Is it that little joking gallantry you reproach him for? You won’t forgive him for that?”

“I like him a lot,” Cattolica heatedly denied the accusation. “It’s only that . . . ”

“Only that you,” Guzzo cut him short, “for a good while, taking advantage, with some hypocrisy, of my good opinion, have taken to paying scant attention. Scantinamus, unceasingly. I see you, don’t think I don’t, you and your good neighbor tirelessly gabbing away sub tegmine manuum.^# What’s wrong with the two of you? Do you think—mistakenly—that you’ve already well and truly passed? Or is it the spring that’s affecting you?”

Cattolica turned, as if to ask me to bear witness. But he said nothing. He turned back toward Guzzo, whose eyes meanwhile were slowly scanning all the desks.

“I wonder,” Guzzo said at last, “whether it wouldn’t be wise to proceed without further delay to the separation of this pair who by now have grown only too well attuned. In any case, my dear Cattolica, you have been warned. If I catch you chattering once more, I’ll send you back there, to the back row, to sit next to that saintly fellow Pulga. Have you understood?”

He unscrewed his pen top, opened his ledger, and immersed himself in writing a long negative report.

Once out on the street, we never tried to stay together, since as soon as we were outside the school the usual configurations reformed, and Luciano was there, ready to glue himself to my side, very often not leaving me until we were at the corner of Via Terranova, halfway up Corso Giovecca. But apart from the afternoons when we saw each other for gym lessons (at least two of them), we began to phone each other in the evening, usually before going to bed.

What did we talk about? I couldn’t say; I’ve forgotten.

I suppose we talked about the teachers, about our schoolmates, about the books we were reading—we had utterly different tastes: I preferred cloak-and-dagger novels of adventure, Dumas, Ponson du Terrail, Verne, and the Children’s Encyclopaedia; he was more advanced and liked books of popular science and fictionalized biographies. We talked, I suppose, about things without much importance when set beside what was brewing. But how else could we have behaved? The sound of our words was the ink with which the cuttlefish, in order to flee from a threat, darkens the water around it. Under the refuge of that acoustic ink we kept on studying, brushing against each other the cautious tentacles we had extended.

However, what Cattolica told me about Boldini and Grasso, I remember very well indeed.

Against all my expectations, Cattolica displayed an absolute freedom of judgement toward them. In his opinion, Boldini had “an excellent brain.” He lacked imagination, though, that flair which always accompanied true intelligence. Very ordered, punctual as a Swiss watch, over-precise, he was too closed up in himself, too egotistical. In the six years he’d known him, he’d never been able to put together a coherent argument, never any proper reasoning. At every attempt of his, Boldini always replied with the usual grunts, the usual whistling through his teeth, the same old pats on the back. He was strong, that was certainly true, more than strong. Last month he had swum across the River Po, up at the Giarina, when the temperature was almost sub-zero. But all considered, he was a mediocrity, and his cultish devotion to building up his muscles was abundant proof of that. As for Grassi, although his mind and character were the opposite of “that other one,” he didn’t amount to much either. He read a great deal, knew masses of things, but at the end of the day, what did that count for? . . . Boldini never read a single book that wasn’t an assigned text, and that, it was clear, was a mistake. But Grassi read too much, at random, with the result that he stuffed his head with junk and made his short-sightedness worse day by day. Was he a good character? He tried hard enough to be considered as such, with that sickly air of a Silvio Pellico!^** But at the end of the day he was sincere, a friend you could count on . . . Maturity, balance, a harmony between their various mental and physical qualities, that was what they were both missing, Boldini as much as Grassi.

By such criticism, it became evident that it was his intention to place himself and me on another, higher plane. But I didn’t let myself become spellbound. Hearing him hold forth in that way about his best friends made me more distrustful than ever.

I had a burning desire to teach him a lesson. For this reason, too, I often made a point of speaking well of Luciano. He wasn’t an idiot at all—I would say—nor was he the hypocrite everyone thought him. I understood that he looked unprepossessing, and from the beginning even I’d had to overcome no small internal resistance. On the other hand, if one were only to choose one’s friends on the basis of their physical appearance, what would become of mankind? And goodbye to any Christian charity! When Pulga arrived in Ferrara—I recounted, moved by my own words despite myself—he knew no one and had nothing, not even the school books. His family had yet to find a house—they had to camp out in the Hotel Tripoli: in the condition he found himself in then, how could I refuse the help and hospitality he was in such urgent need of? True: although he wasn’t an idiot at all—he made as if he was, mainly because he was too lazy to make an effort—I didn’t get much from studying with him, but not even intellectual capability constitutes the true cement of friendship.

“And what, according to you, does constitute the true cement of friendship?” Cattolica asked me at this point one evening.

We were on the phone. Heralded by a little sarcastic chuckle, the question took me by surprise.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s hard to say. How do two people ever become friends? Because, fundamentally, they like each other, I suppose. But would you tell me why you’re asking me a question like that?”

“Just because,” he replied mysteriously. “No particular reason. I only wanted to have your learned opinion on the matter. So then the true cement of friendship would consist of”—here he laughed again—“reciprocal feelings. Have I got that right?”

“Absolutely.”

For a moment, he added nothing more. But the next evening, again on the phone, it was he who returned to the topic once more. He began by declaring that he’d thought long and hard about what we’d spoken of the day before. It was right that amity and “amore ” had the same root: “am .” And if love is fundamentally a desire to be in accord with, to identify oneself with the other, to feel with the other (“sun-pathèin ”), it follows that “sympathy” is at the root of friendship as well. But now would I let him put another question to me?

“Of course.”

I registered a slight hesitation on the line.

“Let’s be frank with each other,” he said in a strangely wearied voice. “Do you really like Pulga?”

“I do, yes,” I replied with a laugh, relieved. “Why shouldn’t I like him? He might not be a high-flyer. Sometimes he can be a bit of a bore, a bit interfering. But at heart he’s a good character. You people immediately shut the door in his face, because . . . Poor thing. He really hasn’t deserved that kind of treatment.”

I was confident he would see I was right, would recognize how wrong he’d been and say sorry.

“Have you ever been to his house?” he asked instead.

“No. Why? He always comes round to mine.”

“Well, listen . . . ” he went on, once again, hesitantly, “ . . . do you think that he likes you ?”

I was shaken by the question, but even more by the tone of his voice, at first unsure and subdued, then suddenly resolute: like someone who, after hesitating a long time between two roads, one easy and level, the other steep and perilous, finally decides on the second. I didn’t understand. Where was all this going?

I replied that everything made me believe my feelings were reciprocated.

“You’re sure of that?”

“I would say so. As I told you, it’s always he who seeks me out. If he didn’t like me, wouldn’t you think that rather than coming round every afternoon to my house, he’d go to someone else’s? Even . . . ” I added ironically “ . . . round to yours.”

He sighed.

“How naive you are!”

“Naive?”

But he didn’t want to explain it to me. He was so unwilling that, to persuade him, or rather, to use his own phrase—to rid him of the lead weight he was carrying—I was forced to insist a great deal. At last, he burst out by saying that I ought to hear Pulga—my dear Pulga—what delightful things he said about me behind my back!

9.

“DON’T TAKE it amiss, but you really are naive,” Cattolica had repeated in conclusion. “And that’s precisely why I’m so disgusted by his behavior.”

I could see he wasn’t trying to hoodwink me, that he was telling the truth. And yet although I was hurt (my heart had almost stopped), it was all I could do to stop myself yelling with joy. This was my big chance to get free of Luciano—I suddenly thought—here it was at last!

I managed, somehow, to restrain myself.

“I don’t believe it,” I said irritably.

“I expected that,” he replied. “But I can give you proof if you want.”

I didn’t reply, and put down the receiver. I was sure he’d ring back. I waited for some minutes, shut in the telephone cupboard. Nothing. Suddenly the door opened and my mother’s face appeared.

“What are you doing sitting there in the dark?” she asked, scrutinizing me with worried eyes.

“I was on the phone.”

“To whom? Cattolica?”

“Yes.”

“Why is it, these last few days, you’re always on the phone to him?”

Instead of replying, I gave her a light kiss on the cheek and said goodnight.

It was very hot in my room. As soon as I entered I locked the door and opened the windows wide. It was a lovely, starry night, moonless, but very bright. Down in the garden the shape of the trees stood out sharply: there the magnolia, and farther back the fir-tree, and down at the end where the three arches of the entrance terminated was the lime-tree. Between the flowerbeds was the milky whiteness of the gravel, and in the middle of the even brighter clearing that opened in front of the dark cave of the entrance, a black spot: a stone perhaps, or maybe Filomena, our ancient tortoise, whose awakening from hibernation my mother had joyfully announced at supper.

“Filomena!” I called out in a muffled voice. “Hey!”

I stepped back into the room, slowly undressed, and, without closing the window, stretched out on the bed with my hands linked behind my neck. I was completely naked. From the garden the intense odor of plants and the grass was perceptible. More than ever convinced that Cattolica had not been lying, I thought about Luciano. But of course! I said to myself again and again, gradually taking in the huge injustice Luciano had done me, and yet at the same time feeling glad, lightened, freed of a crushing weight. But of course! How blind I’d been for so long, not to have seen what a traitor Luciano was! I tried to shrug it off, to rise above it. “What a swine!” I muttered between my teeth, “what a bastard!” Tomorrow, at school, I would confront that Judas straightaway. I would ask him point blank: “So it’s like that, is it? So it’s true you badmouth me behind my back?” and without waiting for him to deny or confirm it, I would give him a slap in front of everyone. I could see the whole scene: me, red in the face with my eyes popping out, fists raised to punch him; he, the little wretch, the despicable little cad, writhing at my feet as he tried to protect his swollen, bruised face, while the others stood around in a circle in silence. I would fly into a fury, rain down blows on him, and Luciano wouldn’t defend himself. He would only try to shield his face with those repellent palms of his, without even crying. He would take his punishment, and that would be it.

The next day, as soon as I awoke from a dreamless, leaden sleep, everything took on a different aspect. I was still determined to profit from the opportunity that had been offered me to break with Luciano, to unchain myself once and for all from the enslavement of that hideous nightmare, which had, for some time, secretly and unconfessably, darkened my days. But my role of executioner quickly seemed absurd to me, and, besides, hard to put into practice. And with Luciano standing at the corner of Corso Giovecca and Via Borgoleoni, waiting for me—without doubt, he was waiting for me: and, spotting him, I felt myself seized with an obscure sense of guilt and fear—I tried to behave as if nothing had happened. That cool, sunny morning we walked together to school, speaking of matters both trivial and serious. Every now and then I glanced at him. He seemed smaller than ever, weak and pathetic in his grey vicuña short trousers, with skinny legs like a flamingo. But I could barely bring myself to look at his high, slightly bulging forehead, the seat of so much malice.

Further down the entrance corridor, flanked by his usual cronies, I saw Cattolica. He was walking with Boldini and Grassi, looking tall and slender between them, and he stared at me with a serious, haughty expression. I pretended not to see him. But in class, as we waited for the lesson to begin, it was he who spoke first.

“A fine way to behave,” he began, with a look both offended and disgusted. “Might you explain why yesterday evening you slammed the phone down on me?”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I’m not sure why myself.”

“Do you believe me, or don’t you?”

Pale, thin, he scrutinized me with those black eyes of his that burned with fanaticism in the depths of their sockets, like those of a medieval monk. I understood clearly that his motive was only the wish to humiliate me. But I needed him now. No one else besides him could help me.

“I’ll believe you when you’ve given me proof,” I replied.

The teacher, I don’t remember which, came in, and we had to shut up. But during the morning Cattolica returned to the topic several times. It was hard to talk that way, both of us covering our mouth with our hands, but we did so anyway.

“Fair enough,” he began, “it’s more than reasonable you should ask for proof. But to have it, you’d have to come round to my house.”

“To your house?”

“Definitely. I’ll ask Pulga to come as well, and so you’ll hear for yourself the kind of stuff he says.”

“But what exactly does he say?”

“If you want me to tell you,” he replied, with a grimace of distaste, “you’ll have to wait till the cows come home. I can’t stand gossiping.”

The idea of a confrontation now began to frighten me.

“Hear for myself?” I murmured. “But how will I do that?”

“Come to my place, I’ve told you. I have a very precise plan to make him sing. Don’t be scared.”

“When should I come?”

“Today, if you’d like.”

“At what time?”

“Oh, whenever you please,” he said in a considerate tone. “At four, at five, at six, at seven . . . come when you want. All you have to do,” and here he smiled, “is tell me exactly when.”

I pointed at the backs of Boldini and Grassi.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “They’ll be there too. For it to work, they need to be.”

I still hesitated, but ended up agreeing. I said that I’d get rid of Pulga with some excuse or other and that I’d be at his house at six.

“Be on time,” he warned me. “Otherwise there’s the risk you’ll meet him at the door.”

At the exit, there Luciano was, once again at my side. But by then I was calm and determined.

“By the way,” I said when we’d come to the top of Via Borgoleoni, “it’s better if you don’t come round today.”

He arched an eyebrow.

“No? Why’s that?”

In the school entrance, a little earlier, I had seen Cattolica say something to him, and him replying and then nodding silently. What a hypocrite! I thought. How good he was at faking, the hideous little worm!

“I’ve an appointment,” I replied brusquely, avoiding his bright blue eyes anxiously searching my own, and staring instead at the little droplets of sweat that pearled above his upper lip.

“An appointment?”

I threw out the first thing that came into my head. I had to go to my Uncle Giacomo’s to be examined. With my mother.

“Has your sore throat come back?”

“Yes.”

I pretended to swallow with difficulty.

“I think my uncle wants to operate.”

He stared at me with a strange, dark, saddened expression. As if he had guessed I was lying. As if he had guessed everything.

“I see. And what time do you go to your uncle’s? If you were going late, I could come round to yours a bit earlier. Perhaps at three, or three-thirty.”

“No, it’s better you don’t. I’m not sure what time my uncle wants to see me.”

We had stopped to talk at the angle of Corso Giovecca, at the same spot where I’d met him that morning, and there we parted.

At six o’clock on the dot I rang the doorbell of Cattolica’s house.

It was he who opened the door, and it was he, having come down the three concrete steps in front of the door, who hefted my bike onto his shoulders and went into the small entrance hall before me.

Outside, it was still very light. I had crossed the city with the low sun in my eyes, but in the narrow entrance hall of the Cattolicas’ house, without a window and lit only by a solitary low-wattage lamp, it was so dark it was hard to see. I noticed, at a glance, the floor covered with dark, shiny, slippery tiles, an enormous coat rack up against the wall of the entrance door, the bare, ugly, skeletal staircase that, in the same kind of dense concrete as the outer steps, ascended in a spiral to the floor above, and in front of me, beneath the stairs, a half-closed glass door, beyond which I could just make out a small dining room crossed by a melancholy ray of sunlight. Heaped up one on top of the other against the coat-rack, were three bicycles. The first was Cattolica’s, a grey Maino. Cattolica added mine to the pile, then, having second thoughts, lifted it back on to his shoulders.

“What are you doing?” I asked in a whisper.

“Wiser to carry it through there into the dining room,” he replied, also in a whisper. “Sly as he is, he’d be bound to notice.”

He made his way toward the glass door and disappeared into the room.

“The others are here?” I asked, recognizing their bikes.

“What?”

“I wondered if Boldini and Grassi had already arrived.”

“Of course,” he said, without looking at me, busy cleaning his hands with his handkerchief.

We climbed the stairs without exchanging another word, he in front and I following, until at the top we reached a kind of anteroom, in its unadorned shabbiness similar to the little entrance hall below, and as if hovering above it. From a single window a hesitant light made its way through the pink curtains. Here, too, I made out a black coat-rack leaning against the far wall, hung with dark material. To the left, two doors, both shut. But through the cracks in the wood and through the keyhole of the nearer one filtered a vibrant, vivid, reddish light.

Having opened the door, Cattolica’s back was suffused with that light.

“Come on in,” I heard him say.

10.

ALTHOUGH DAZZLED—IT wasn’t an electric light, as I’d supposed, but the sun, close to setting, which blazed obliquely into the room—I entered, looking about with amazement.

It was big, a kind of reception room, with a large horizontal window which took up most of the wall facing west, and with a second, smaller window looking out toward Via Cavour, the Aqueduct and the Spianata fields. But straightaway, as soon as I’d come in, behind the backlit figures of Boldini and Grassi, I became aware of two pinewood bookcases, one opposite the other, full of beautiful leather-bound volumes; in the center, a dark leather sofa facing a low table; two armchairs upholstered in the same material; the impeccably waxed parquet floor almost entirely hidden by carpets; the bed beside the door which sported a fleecy, carefully folded woolen cover at its foot; and a graceful bedside table level with the top of the headboard. I was struck, in short, by the luxurious appearance of the room, undoubtedly the finest in the house, and beside which, even my study, so admired and praised by Luciano, looked like a cubbyhole. All things considered, he hadn’t greatly exaggerated, Cattolica—I thought—when he’d boasted of that table, proclaiming that almost the whole upper school could have sat around it, “girls included!” Yet again, guessing that behind the ease of the spoiled little rich boy, lay the obsession of both his parents determined to make any sacrifice so that he, the adored only son, might scale the highest and brightest reaches of his career and of life—but mainly the obsession of his mother, the mathematics teacher, with whom, some mornings, I’d seen him arm in arm, a tall, pale, thin woman, with glances that darted from cavernous eye sockets, and capable, by all accounts, of giving a dozen or so detentions a day; yet again, I was gripped by that obscure dislike mixed with envy which, from the very start, I’d felt for the classmate with whom I shared a desk.

I exchanged greetings with Boldini and Grassi, and went to sit at the far end of the table. In front of me was Boldini’s head, half hidden by a big lamp that wore a green silk shade, Grassi on the left and, to the right, Cattolica, who was also now seated and holding forth. I felt uneasy, full not only of apprehension about Luciano’s arrival which I believed to be imminent, but also of suspicion and rancor. Yet Cattolica seemed perfectly calm. He chatted away volubly, entertaining the guest, the outsider. Unfortunately, he couldn’t offer me anything to eat or drink—he said, his black eyes shining and excited—as there was no one but us in the house and his mother wouldn’t be back before nine . . . Then he came straight to the heart of the matter. Given that he had a distaste—it had never been his habit, his “style” to employ “devious means”—he had to remind me that in the last few days he’d tried his best to open my eyes. And I? How had I rewarded his efforts? Not only had I listened with obvious reluctance, but I’d behaved toward him as if he, not Pulga, had been the real villain. This had gone on too long. Now I’d finally understood and, thank God, believed in his good faith. But ask either him, pointing to Boldini, or him, pointing at Grassi: Was it or was it not true, that Pulga, the few times he’d come over to study with them—it had happened a month ago during the nearly two weeks that I’d been ill—had badmouthed me continuously and in the most disgusting way? He was seated just there, where I was, copying their texts with impunity and seizing upon any chance he had to attack me. And he went for me, unprompted, it had to be said, without anyone, ever, even dreaming of encouraging him, so much so that on one occasion he couldn’t resist asking Pulga if I’d done something to hurt him. To which the bastard had replied, No, not a chance, I’d done nothing to him, but that shouldn’t in any way prevent him judging me with objectivity—objectivity, didn’t I see?—for what I was and for my true worth.

I listened. When Cattolica, feverishly pointing his bony finger, prompted me to ask Boldini and Grassi, I obeyed. I detached my gaze from him and turned it first on one and then the other. To Cattolica’s question—“Was it or wasn’t it true?” the former had replied, nodding, with a serious air, while staring at his hands on the table. As for the latter, bent and almost flat against the exercise book in which he was sketching a caricature, he seemed not even to have heard. But his silence meant the same thing: that he agreed, that the facts were just as Cattolica had described them. Both of them were very different—I thought—from how I’d always seen them at school. Boldini’s hair wasn’t blond, but reddish. And only now that I saw his hands clenched together, almost making a single enormous fist, was the strength that Cattolica had ascribed to him apparent to me. And Grassi? Grassi, too, was different. Cattolica had compared him to Silvio Pellico. He was right. Utterly absorbed in his sketch, every now and then he stuck out the tip of his tongue, leaving it there to linger for a few moments, a grey bud at the corner of his mouth. He was right. The comparison was spot on.

I suddenly got up, walked to the window and pressed my forehead against the glass. Having disappeared briefly behind the sugar refinery opposite the station, the sun was no longer in my eyes and the vista, filled with orchards and gardens which stretched from the Cattolicas’ house to the city walls, and then beyond to the endless plain, immediately made me want to be there, with those boys chasing after a ball on the broad walkway on top of the walls, or else there on that fast train which, with its windows lowered, was at that very moment slowly leaving the station, or else there, in the far distance, going along the lovely asphalted street of Pontelagoscuro on that little yellow tram, tiny as a tin can, which was perilously careening toward the black horizontal line made by the banks of the Po. By now it must have begun to cool down outside. If not today, tomorrow, at this very hour, I would take off on my bike and go to see the Po. The Po in full flood. And alone at last. After having exposed Luciano. After having finished with him and with all the others. Alone forever.

“What a total bastard!” Cattolica repeated. “When I think that there are people like Pulga in the world, it makes my blood boil.”

I turned round. I couldn’t wait to be done with it all.

“But are you sure he’s coming?”

“Definitely. Who knows how many miles that creep would be willing to trudge in a day on his little matchstick legs to sneak into other people’s houses? You know those mongrels you just have to whistle for and they immediately come running and wagging their tails? Pulga’s just like that, a real suck-up. Desperate to sneak about and stick his nose in, you know what I mean? And it’s not really as if he does it out of need. It’s just a question of character. Maybe because I’m not a bastard or a suck-up, and I can’t bear that combination, it makes my skin crawl. I’m only at ease in my own home, while, on the contrary, there are people in the world who can never stay put in their own houses.”

“What time did you tell him to come?”

He checked his elegant Eberhard chrome-metal wristwatch and twisted his lips.

“There’s time. I told him, and repeated it, not to come before seven o’clock, and since he does as he’s told, we still have a good twenty-five minutes to arrange things.”

Although he had spoken of his “plan to make him sing,” I don’t know why, but I was sure he had prepared a kind of trial: with himself playing the role of judge and Boldini and Grassi together as assistant judges, with Luciano and me battling it out with words under the scrutiny of the court. I had basically imagined a direct confrontation, and in the last hours it had been this prospect that gradually wrung my stomach in an ever more oppressive grip. It was therefore a relief to learn from Cattolica that his famous scheme did not require my presence in the room at all, and so no “scene” was planned. When Luciano arrived, I would simply pass through to the adjacent bedroom—and, so saying, Cattolica pointed to the door I’d noticed behind Boldini’s back—and from there with the greatest of ease I could hear everything that creature would undoubtedly, once again, spew forth about me. In short, all I had to do was listen. But in the meantime, why not go through right now for a moment, into the other room—it was his parents’ bedroom—taking care to leave the door a fraction ajar? Only in that way could I check beforehand how well I’d be able to hear.

Not to have to see Luciano, to avoid looking at his face, while Cattolica made him talk! Overcome by a sudden sense of euphoria I moved away from the window and, brushing past Boldini’s back, entered the adjoining room.

Inside was very dark, or at least so it seemed to me: the thick darkness of a cellar.

I stationed myself at the door, my eyes at the crack, and said blithely:

“Go on, say something!”

“I’m telling you, Gianni,” Cattolica began in a relaxed manner, turning to Boldini, “in my opinion it’s not true that . . . ”

“I can see that,” Boldini replied, “yes, I can see that . . .”

“Can you hear us OK?” asked Cattolica, raising his voice.

“Perfectly!” I shouted out. “I can hear every word.”

I returned to the study.

I sat down again, but now we didn’t seem to know what else to say. Grassi had begun sketching again. Boldini was looking out the window, his attention drawn, it seemed, to the little fluttering black tatters of the bats that flitted so close to the windows they looked as if they’d smash themselves against them.

Dusk was drawing on. Even Cattolica stopped talking. I saw him glance at his watch again.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Still another ten minutes to go.”

He shook his head, as though unhappy about something. I asked if anything was wrong, and he denied it. I pressed him further and he admitted that yes, there was something wrong.

“Perhaps we’ve been making a mistake all along,” he said.

Staring at me, he then added, that should it suit me, having fully heard all of Pulga’s spiel, if I was to come out of my hiding place and give him a “flurry of slaps,” right where he was sitting, I should feel utterly free to do so. None of them would lift a finger to stop me. Far from it.

“What?” I exclaimed. “D’you mean here?”

“Why not? Postpone the punishment and the guilt is half forgiven. Let’s suppose tomorrow morning at school you take him aside and start saying to him, ‘D’you know, Luciano . . .’ ”—and he began speaking, in a nasal, saccharine tone as if that was the way Luciano and I habitually spoke to each other—“ ‘D’you know, Luciano, yesterday evening I was there at Cattolica’s too, hidden behind a door?’ So, you start telling him like that, that the game’s up and he’s been caught red handed. Sly little cheat that he is, you can be sure that Pulga will manage to convince you there was nothing amiss, that he didn’t mean anything by it, that you hadn’t understood at all, and so on. He’d even be capable of losing his temper, arguing that these things shouldn’t ever be done, that a friend would never play a dirty trick like that, and that he had been aware of everything immediately anyway, had spoken a little ill of you deliberately, to pay you back . . . I can just see you both,” he scoffed. “And everything will vanish like a soap bubble.”

He was right. I too could see myself and Luciano playing this out, and a little later, Luciano would be round at my house to do his homework once again. As though nothing had happened. As though nothing at all had changed.

“Alright, then,” I said uncertainly, looking around me, “but how could it be done here?”

Cattolica leaped to his feet. “I’ll prepare the ring for you.”

On his own, in a flash, he dragged the leather sofa and the little table under the window, so they stood against one of the two bookcases, on the other side of the armchairs, then he rolled up the carpet that was in the center of the room and hid it under the bed.

“There we are,” he said, turning toward us, all red in the face from his exertions.

From the far side of the table Boldini had raised his blue eyes toward me, of the same icy blue that Luciano’s had. He was staring me straight in the face. He tightened his lips, as if fighting against an impulse of shyness, and then said in a serious voice:

“You’re not scared, are you?”

I burst out laughing.

But he didn’t seem very convinced. He asked me how much I weighed. Then he wanted to know how heavy I thought Luciano was. And without waiting for my reply, he concluded that in his opinion a single “slap,” well delivered, would be enough “to knock him down.”

He got up, walked behind Grassi, came over to squeeze the muscles of my arms—Cattolica, silent for once, merely nodded—and meanwhile proceeded to reassure me about the outcome of the approaching contest and to advise me how I ought to hit him. I should follow a left to his belly, with the right, a “haymaker,” to the jaw.

“Let me show you.”

I followed him into the middle of the room, the center of the “ring.” And we were still there, facing each other, intent on practicing the “move” before the infantilized gaze of Cattolica and Grassi, when we heard the doorbell ring.

11.

A LITTLE before, for the few moments I’d been there, the bedroom of Cattolica’s parents had seemed steeped in total darkness. I was wrong. Once there again, I quickly realized that one could see more than enough.

In the room I’d just left, they had turned on the table lamp. Seeping through the gap of the half-closed door, the light was a white band which extended sharply past my feet, across the floor of dark, hexagonal tiles identical to those on the ground floor, without encountering a single object. The very faint light—that of an underground crypt—which spread uniformly across the room was produced by a tiny low dim lamp beneath a holy image hung in the center of the wall to my right. It was enough to disclose the parallel shapes of two separate beds side by side, and the blackish shadow of a dressing table and a wardrobe beside the image itself—which was of a Jesus with languid blue eyes and a blond helmet of hair perfectly parted in the middle, with vermillion lips barely separated to disclose the tips of two snow-white teeth and with one alabaster, feminine hand raised limply to point at a plump red heart that hung like a monstrous fruit high on his chest.

I was tense, alert, but calm. I focused on the image of Jesus, that extravagant red heart; and also on my own, which from the first had been beating furiously, but now had steadied itself. Besides, I was no longer there in the study, a few yards from Cattolica and Luciano, who, after having slowly climbed the stairs, were still lingering to chat in the anteroom. The bedroom where I had hidden appeared at once infinitely more secret, more remote, even more shadowy than it actually was—a speck lost in the womb of a vast space, wide as the ocean . . .

Once the four of them were seated round the table, Luciano, I guessed, occupying the place where, till just before, I myself had sat, I wondered when and in what way they would get round to talking about me.

They had some two hours at their disposal; and perhaps, for this reason too, apart from enjoying keeping me in suspense, Cattolica seemed unconcerned to hurry things along. Patient and sly as a cat with a mouse, he listened to his prey dispensing his fluent, typically Bolognese chatter. Pulga was speaking about trivial enough things. He too was stalling. And so?—Cattolica had the air of saying, though remaining almost entirely silent—and so? Let the little toad keep croaking, let him do his utmost to appear amusing and intriguing in exchange for the inestimable gift of being invited and accepted there. Sooner or later—from the tone of his sparse replies, of his measured interruptions to the ceaseless hum of Luciano’s voice, I understood how sure of himself Cattolica felt—get around to doing exactly what we had all, myself included, agreed to do.

So, for a long time, for a good half-hour, Luciano spoke of things that related to me only indirectly.

He began speaking about their homework. He asked if they’d finished it. And since Cattolica answered in the affirmative, that they had completed it just now, a moment before he’d arrived—Oh well, he sighed, lucky them! He, by contrast, hadn’t managed to get through more than a fraction: the Latin and Italian he’d done, but not any Greek yet. No, really, but thanks a lot! he had then exclaimed, allowing me to almost see the rapid lateral shift of his jaw—it wasn’t necessary for Cattolica to lend him his exercise book. Apart from the fact that every now and then he liked to try doing it on his own, that is, translating the ninety-eight verses of The Iliad assigned us by that “crabby” old Guzzo, he still had the whole evening after supper and tomorrow morning to finish it.

From homework, he changed the subject to philosophy.

Razzetti had yet to quiz him in class—he said—and so tomorrow morning, when he’d finished working on The Iliad, he certainly needed to take a look at Phaedo, as one could never be sure . . . and speaking of which, Razzetti, sure enough, philosophy wasn’t his forte, and he could only teach it by way of the usual smoke and mirrors, relying on those synopses he also resorted to in his history classes. But Plato himself, wasn’t he, anyway, every bit as dull as poor old Razzetti? And Socrates! Always pontificating with his smug, know-all teacher’s air, and yet as stupid as they come, an utter fool! Just as well that at the end—he’d skipped ahead—they’d given him that famous cup of hemlock to drink. But even leaving aside Plato and Socrates, in his modest opinion, the whole of philosophy was a load of crap.

“What d’you mean?” objected Cattolica. “It’s not as though philosophy is religion, there’s no need for you to believe in it!”

“Excuse my ignorance, but what is it, then?”

Slowly, good-naturedly, indulgently, Cattolica began to expound his thoughts on philosophy. Grassi, and even Boldini, also chipped in every now and then.

“I daresay all of you are right,” Luciano sighed at a certain point.

All the same—he added—with what little grey matter that “after so much cranking the shank” he had left at his disposal, who knows what low marks he’d get tomorrow morning, should it occur to Razzetti to test him. He was no Cattolica, unfortunately, someone who only needed to read something once to understand it! Of little intelligence, as he knew himself to be, with only the faintest glimmer of a memory . . .

But going back to Phaedo: it seemed to him, as he’d already said, nothing more than worthless blather. And yet, there was one theory in it that, while probably a load of rubbish, nevertheless had somewhat convinced him.

“I’ll bet that was the theory of metempsychosis,” Cattolica interposed.

“How did you guess?”

Cattolica replied that if there was one thing in Phaedo which he himself could give no credence to, it was precisely the theory of the transmigration of souls from men to animals and vice versa. To believe in that, you’d have to dispose of the whole Catholic religion. And he, as a good Catholic, believed in hell, purgatory and heaven.

“I wouldn’t argue with that,” Luciano replied contritely, “even though I feel there’s an element of truth in metempsychosis.”

Listen—he went on—take Guzzo, for example: most likely before being born with two legs and arms, he had been a poisonous snake—an adder or a cobra, take your pick—and would revert to that as soon as, God willing, he breathes his last. And Krauss, who, perched up there in her cupboard among her retorts and alembics, gives herself the grand air of being a wise owl, maybe she used to be a duck instead. You just had to look at her backside. Old Half-pint, who knows, perhaps he used to be an earthworm, the kind you find by the bucket load when you’re out in the country and give a clod of mud a kick; tiny, it’s true, but lovely and fat and pink.

And moving down the scale to our classmates, it’s more than probable that Mazzanti was a rat, only you’d have to decide whether he was a country rat, a cellar rat or a sewer rat; Chieregatti, a pack mule; Lattuga, a pig, obviously, and perhaps a hyena as well, since hyenas feed on corpses, corpses dug up in cemeteries, and they stink even worse than pigs; Donadio, a guinea pig, Camurri, a blind mole; Droghetti, with that nose of his, a camel; Selmi a horse—more of a carthorse, though; Veronesi and Danieli, poor things, two donkeys, with their dicks always dangling, and so on. So, just supposing for the moment that metempsychosis isn’t the nonsense it may well be, all of them would in time revert to their original forms, with the exception of Lattuga, who, retaining his identity, would be reborn as a worm, of the sort that squirms about in the intestines; here, he broke into dialect: “dèinter in la mérda a mèza gamba”^†† and also excepting Mazzanti, who instead of being reborn as a rat, even if it was a sewer rat, there’s every reason to suppose that he’ll find himself turned into a louse trudging his way through someone’s pubes.

“You’ve forgotten the girls,” Cattolica observed.

“They don’t count. Haven’t you seen them? Where d’you think they all come from? Obviously, all of them were geese or hens.”

I heard him snigger. He sounded all fired up and very pleased with himself.

“And me?” Cattolica persisted. “What might I have descended from, in your opinion? Go on, don’t be shy.”

“I dunno, perhaps from a bird: a falcon of the alpine variety, or a sparrowhawk, or even an eagle. That ‘over the others’ ”—he recited Dante through his nose—“ ‘ like an eagle, flies . . . ’ ” ^‡‡

“Oh yeah! And Boldini?”

“Give me a moment. He could have been a jaguar, or an elephant seal. While you, Grassi, d’you know what you used to be? You were a beaver, one of those beasts with two big front teeth, always paddling around constructing dams . . . ”

Anyway—he went on—he was of the same opinion as Plato, that there were very few men and women indeed, whom, when they were reborn, would manage not to regress. He himself had perhaps been a dog. And would always return as a dog, unless, like Mazzanti and Lattuga, he had to descend a great deal lower. For some moments, they remained perfectly silent.

“So, to sum up,” Cattolica finally responded. “Lattuga’s a tapeworm, Mazzanti’s a pubic louse, and you?”

“Hmm. We’ll have to wait and see.”

He then said if he had to choose what type of parasite he’d be reincarnated as, he’d almost prefer to descend to the very lowest point, and rather than be a flea or a tick, to be reborn as a microbe. That would be a reincarnation with real privileges! No worries as far as food and drink went, guaranteed invisibility . . . a real godsend, all considered. Responsibilities? Nothing apart from making modest claims, avoiding the behavior of certain microbes, like those of typhoid, rabies, tetanus, pneumonia and so on, those that gloat because in a few days they’ve ruined everything. Rather than that, it was much more sensible to model one’s behavior on those microbes of a better character, who, once they found a quiet little dwelling, stay there happily eating away, for twenty, thirty, forty years, and, at the final reckoning, don’t really annoy anyone. The syphilis bacillus or those of certain kinds of tuberculosis: those are the proper gents with brains, able to live and let live! His father always said the same.

He sniggered again. The others didn’t breathe a word.

And it was just at this point that Cattolica pronounced my name. It was as if it didn’t belong to me, as if it belonged to some unknown person.

“Fair enough,” he added. “Let’s suppose that you’re a dog. How about him?”

“Another dog,” he replied without hesitation. “No doubt about it.”

With this difference—he went on—that while he himself had once been, he’d bet on it, one of those small worthless mongrels, always trotting about the streets in search of questionable matter to “sniff”—turds, dog piss, etc.,—I, by contrast, must have been one of those “big dogs,” far from thoroughbred, but still quite a fine cross breed, one it’s always fairly easy to find a good home for. That’s it, a big dog, but not one of the very biggest, good looking but not a beauty, strong but not that strong: one of those dogs that when they meet a mongrel of the “Pulga type,” weighing a mere couple of kilos and only a palm or so high, often, it falls out that it’s the mongrel who drags the other dog along with him wherever he wants to go. And it’s not by any means always the case that “the fine big dog” isn’t the one sniffing the other’s arse. Quite the contrary!

12.

WHEN THEY’D finished laughing—all four of them had burst out laughing, Cattolica included—the conversation continued. Now it was about me that they spoke and, as before, it was the voices of Luciano and Cattolica that were heard above the others.

What were they saying?

Cattolica was asking Luciano how he’d managed to get rid of me. And Luciano replied to him that everything had been as easy as pie, as it was I who had announced that I was busy that afternoon. I had a very sore throat, I’d said—though perhaps that was a fib—and had to go for an appointment with my uncle who was a doctor.

“A fib?” Cattolica asked quietly. “And why would that be?”

“Who can say. He’s not that easy to figure out. He seems naive and yet he’s so complicated and suspicious! He takes offence over trifles!”

Unfortunately—he continued—between the three of them and me there wasn’t the best of relations, and no one knew that better than him, who, caught between enemy lines, had had to work so hard at reconciliation. But on this subject, what had actually happened between us to justify my rancor toward them? What had they actually done to me? He knew, all too well, what weird quirks of character to expect from a Jew. But that much anger!

“That really surprises me,” Cattolica replied. “I’ve never had anything against him. And nor have those two.”

“D’you know what I think?”

“Tell us.”

“I think,” Luciano resumed, lowering his voice, “that he’s irked most of all by the fact that he’d like to be your friend, to come round here as well, while instead”—and here he sniggered—“he’s been left in the lurch.”

“I think you’re wrong about that,” said Cattolica, with a flicker of impatience. “First of all, we’re the best of friends, otherwise I’d like to know why on earth we would have kept on sharing the same desk for so many months. And secondly, if, as you say, he was so keen to come round to study at my house, why has he never asked me? He could very well ask me, don’t you think?”

“Of course he could!” Luciano exclaimed. “Only, if you’ll let me explain, if it was him that had to ask you, what pleasure would he have got from that? Don’t you see?—and I know him well enough to know what I’m saying—he wanted above all for you to invite him. And since you weren’t ever inclined to . . . ”

From the sound of a chair being shifted I gathered that Cattolica had stood up. Muffled by the carpet, his footsteps suddenly resounded on the bare wood of the “ring,” then once more became deadened. Perhaps he’d gone to sit on the bed at the far end of the room, or even stretched out on it.

“But what has he done to you,” he said at last from down there, “that you always speak so ill of him?”

Luciano, too, got up from his seat. Most likely he’d felt the need to be nearer Cattolica and, to confirm it, when he spoke, his voice sounded farther off, different.

He said that it was true, that basically he couldn’t stand me, but not so much because he found me disagreeable, or because I’d behaved badly toward him. If he criticized me, he did so for much more serious reasons than merely because we were incompatible characters, or out of any trivial, childish, hysterical spite. He was mature enough to suppress any reaction of that kind. But for this very reason, because he was above any such pettiness, not even a sense of gratitude would stop him saying, with objectivity, whatever he thought was right and useful to say about me.

For example, to start off with: my vanity, my incredible, absurd vanity, that of a child in kindergarten.

He’d perceived this straightaway, right from the start.

“Have you ever been to his house?” he asked.

“No,” Cattolica replied. “I never go round to other people’s houses. It’s a principle of mine.”

Well—Luciano went on—it’s a real palatial spread, as big as four or five normal houses stuck together, and endowed with a magnificent garden besides. My family, on its own, had reserved the whole second floor for itself, an apartment of some twenty or so rooms—who knows the cost of heating it! We were basically made of money, and you could see it. But a gentleman is a gentleman, and a profiteer is something else. Our wealth didn’t date back to an earlier era than that of my paternal grandfather, a wholesale textile merchant—that was something I’d confirmed for him on the first day, when, without giving him time to catch his breath, I’d taken him on a room-by room tour of the whole place. I had immediately shown him everything: the salon for parties, the three drawing rooms, the two dining rooms, the seven bedrooms, the four bathrooms, the so-called “office,” and even the toilets, one for the owners and one for the servants; and all the time I looked smug and complaisant, disgustingly pleased with myself. On every door frame, my grandfather, who, as I’d told him, was very religious, had had attached certain small rods made of nickel, about the size of a fifty centesimo piece, each of which had a little piece of paper with writing in Hebrew rolled up inside it. He’d asked me for some explanation about this, and you should have seen my face as I expounded on the minutiae of the meaning and function of those gadgets. I was blushing with pleasure! What was written inside those rods? Nothing. The name of God the father, and that’s it. Such was my vanity that I even transformed our religion into a personal or a family achievement. Our God—I’d used these very words—is the Eternal God, the one and only—in my opinion Christianity should be seen as a more modern version of Judaism. And so it may be. But as I went on about Him, my “Old Man with a Beard,” I assumed the same triumphal air with which I might swank about that good old salt, my grandpa, the canny wholesale cloth merchant . . .

We had started studying every day in tandem. But even here, I revealed a conspicuous desire to show off, to be in the lead—everything became a spur to competition for me—at home, as much as at school, I behaved as if I was perpetually in a soccer match, which was enough to induce anyone close to me to let me forge ahead and win, and be done with it. It was quite true that “scholastically speaking” for months he had lived in my shadow, transformed by me into a kind of parasite, a hermit crab. But hold on! The hermit crab is a poor crustacean about whom it’s fair to say it “gratefully proffers its backside,” but a classmate, even if from a less well-off family, even if less intelligent and knowledgeable, even if in the end not at all unhappy to have found someone prepared to do the work for him, is still always a classmate, which is to say, a human being! I had never considered him either a human being or a friend, and that was the truth. His only purpose had been as a machine for doling out praise, worked with the same detachment as turning on a tap.

He’d barely even seen my brother and sister. The brother was still in the second form of the ginnasio and the girl, the youngest, was only in the third form of primary school. But he’d certainly had a chance to see my parents up close. Particularly my mother.

“Have you ever had a look at her?”

“Who?”

“His mother.”

“No.”

“That’s a shame, because as women go she’s certainly worth the effort.”

She was a lady of around thirty three—he went on—maybe a bit “brassy” as Jewesses always are, but with a stunning mouth, with big, brown eyes, which send out some very particular looks . . .

Although she was dark-eyed and dark-haired, it was mainly her that I looked like. And in the same way that I, vain and in constant need of praise, made use of him as a vaulting horse to measure the strength of my muscles, his mother, too, had made use of him as the best means to ensure that her nice little boy stayed safely home till supper-time. She’d be capable of any sly tricks, that gracious dame, just to achieve this worthy end! She would turn up with huge trays that would have kept hunger at bay for a whole family for two days. Coffee and milk, tea, hot chocolate, whipped cream, pastry, little cakes, petits fours, chocolate sweets: every afternoon a complete panoply. But this was nothing, because apart from that air she always had, “the hussy,” while filling your cup or putting cakes under your nose—“Go on, don’t be polite,” she presses you in her insinuating way, “sweets are nourishing, they build up the muscles and the mind!”—she never failed, afterward, taking her leave, to cast back through the half-closed door a look that was “half maternal and half femme fatale .” And the kisses that, so close up, she would often plant on the cheeks of her good little son, all beaming with joy to see he was there, within the warm glow of the radiators, so hard-working, so handsome and clever, what kisses!

One evening last winter, when there was a storm, she went a bit further. To persuade him to stay for supper and perhaps even to sleep there overnight, she suddenly began to stare at him, looking into his eyes so intensely that it would have put the frighteners, not just on him, whom it didn’t take much to scare, but the very devil. What was she promising with that look? That’s enough, he’d better stop there. One thing for sure was that the summer at the seaside—we’d be going to Cesanatico next summer, take note!—a woman like that, what wouldn’t she get up to during the week when her feeble old husband would have to return to the city to sort out his affairs, leaving her in the rented villa with no other company than the servants and the children! With those big fleshy lips, with those languid eyes, half hidden by her hair—her breasts had sagged a bit, true, but the “undercarriage” was perhaps worth a visit all on its own—there was no way that, given the chance, he’d let her escape.

But, going back to me, could they believe that I didn’t even know what “jacking off” was?

To tell the truth, he’d always suspected it. And yet, on the occasion when, cornered, I’d had the courage to admit that I’d never done it, he was gobsmacked. At sixteen! And giving himself such airs, as well!

Let’s start with having a look at it, he’d said.

After much prevarication, he’d got me to show him my dick—which although a “Roundhead” from circumcision, had seemed to him utterly normal and average. Yet there had been another event which had seemed to him “pretty symptomatic,” and that was my reaction when, a bit before, to convince me to unbutton, he’d had the idea of unbuttoning himself.

Well, I went so pale at seeing his, his dick, and then, in the following days, my manner of behaving was so changed—I became surly and rude all at once, my eyes were shifty, as if he had disgusted me or, I don’t know, made me angry—that he couldn’t but think the worst. Indeed. I was undoubtedly a “pansy,” though perhaps in a latent state: only waiting for the “bell to ring” before “I crossed over,” and as yet still ignorant—this being the tragic thing—of the lovely career that would inevitably open before me . . .

13.

ON TIPTOE, slowly leaving the shadow for the light, I moved toward the large glass door that separated the sitting room from the dining room.

My family was having supper. Seated with her back to me, my mother was wearing a light dress of white linen that left her neck, back and arms bare. Around the table were my father, my brother Ernesto, my sister Fanny.

I looked at each of them, one after the other, as if they were strangers—an odd memory block hindered me from remembering my mother’s face, which was hidden from me. Was he my father, I wondered, that poor old man in slippers and pyjama top, who was just finishing up his bowl of soup? Were they my siblings, those two little children with such a grave and solemn air who, within seconds, would burst out laughing? And the lady with her back to me, the beautiful woman with dark hair haloed with light, her left hand glinting with rings when she lifted it to wave it about, was she really my mother? And was it possible that I myself was the son of that mediocrity of a man, both bored and boring, unable to contain himself, especially at home, to act in a dignified fashion, and of that woman who seemed so common, and that, precisely to that union, that physical union, I owed my existence?

The maid arrived carrying the plates of meat and vegetables, and suddenly, from the expression, between surprise and fear, which her face assumed, I realized that my presence had been registered.

“It’s the young sir!” she exclaimed.

I had no other option. I pushed down on the door handle, went in and sat at my place beside my mother.

“But, dear, it’s nine-thirty!” My mother broke the silence around the table, smiling. “Where have you been?”

She was looking at my face, my hands, checking everything. And through her fearful glances, worried, and at the same time collusive, I understood how far she was an involved participant in the atrocious wound that had been dealt me such a short time ago. Who knows? Perhaps, by mysterious means, she too had suffered at the exact same moment that I had.

I replied that I’d been round at a friend’s house.

“At Cattolica’s?”

“Yes.”

“You two have now become inseparable, eh? I wonder what Pulga has to say about that. Was he there too?”

“What a way to behave!” my father intervened in an indignant tone. “You could have phoned, surely? It would have cost you no effort at all.”

“Yes, Pulga was there,” I murmured, without lifting my eyes from the empty soup bowl.

My father opened his mouth, but a furtive gesture of her ring-laden hand was at the ready to hush him.

“Would you like some cold soup?” she asked me.

I nodded.

But I wasn’t hungry. I ate slowly, with half-spoonfuls, feeling as if my stomach would reject the food. I imagined myself back in the bedroom of Cattolica’s parents, my shoulders pressed against the wall and my eyes fixed on the Jesus with that red heart, and could still hear the calm, indefatigable hum of Luciano’s voice through the partition. No, I didn’t step out, I didn’t make an appearance. After I heard Luciano say, with a laugh, “Such prodigious efforts to learn all that Latin and Greek, and what chance does he have of any career but that one?” I finally shook myself, stepped away from the wall, crossed the room, and walked out into the anteroom. In the thick darkness, I went down the stairs, found my bike in the small dining room, and then in the open air began pedaling rapidly with my head down. Via Cittadella, Viale Cavour, Corso Giovecca: onward, without ever stopping, as if down a dark straight endless tunnel . . .

“Aren’t you hungry, darling?”

I shook my head.

“He’ll have eaten something,” my father grumbled.

I got to my feet.

“I feel a bit sick. Best if I don’t eat supper.”

“What have you been eating”—my father pressed the point—“ice cream?”

“I haven’t eaten a thing.” I stared at him coldly, with hatred.

“Calm down!” he responded, intimidated. “Did you get out of bed on the wrong side?”

“Goodnight.”

Without giving either him or my mother the customary goodnight kiss on the cheek, I quickly left the room.

As soon as I was in my bedroom I stripped, got between the sheets, turned off the light and closed my eyes. I remained like that for some ten minutes. I couldn’t sleep. I was about to get up and dressed again when I heard my mother’s steps in the corridor.

She stopped before the door. I heard her call me in a low voice, then felt the room fill with her presence. What a bore! I thought to myself in fury, pretending to be asleep. I felt her beside me, tall and silent above my outstretched body, and I wanted to get up, insult her, slap her and chase her away. But then, as cool, as fresh and light as ever, I felt her hand descend through the dark to touch my forehead and rest there. That alone sufficed. Nothing else was needed for me, just a little later, alone again, to fall asleep, to fall once again into the deep curative sleep of a child.

The next morning, entering the classroom, I saw at once that everyone was there, seated at their own desks. Luciano quickly greeted me with a smile and with a festive wave. But from Boldini’s and Grassi’s behavior, leaning over an exercise book they had between them, and that of Cattolica in particular, whose gaze, as I drew closer to him, didn’t leave my face for a second, it was clear to me that even they realized the irreparable gravity of what had happened the evening before. Cattolica waited till I sat down and didn’t even greet me: he merely gave a faint grin. I knew him well enough to understand that he felt lost and worried. But why? I wondered. What was making him walk on eggshells? Was it perhaps the hope that I hadn’t stayed to the bitter end, and so hadn’t heard the worst? It could have been that. In any case, if that had been his hope, I would soon strip away any illusion he was under. Everything was over between us, over forever. And he should understand that as soon as possible.

He covered his mouth with his hand.

“You did the right thing to leave,” he said. “It really wasn’t worth your trouble staying.”

I lowered my head in assent and didn’t reply.

He sighed.

“He’s crazy. He’s a poor fool who can’t control himself.”

“Leave me alone, and stop bothering me.”

Guzzo was at the teacher’s desk. I had spoken without troubling to cover my mouth, and was immediately aware the teacher was scrutinizing me.

“Are we at it again?” he said threateningly.

As though inspired, I leaped to my feet and stared him in the face.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but could I ask you to let me change places?”

“And why ever should I do that, my dear fellow? Have you perhaps forgotten that there are fewer than ten days before the end of term?”

“I know. But it’s precisely because of that I want to change places. Here, with him”—I nodded toward Cattolica—“it always ends up with us continually distracting each other.”

My words were received with a prolonged whisper of consternation and disapproval.

“May I ask you all to stay absolutely silent?” Guzzo shouted.

He had the air of not believing what was happening. But there I was, in front of him, standing rigid and straight, determined to get what I was asking for.

He looked around, bewildered.

“And to which desk would you like to be transferred? It doesn’t look to me as if any are available.”

“I’d like to go again to the back of the class”—pointing at Luciano’s desk without turning round—“where Pulga is. But on my own.”

“And Signor Pulga?”

“Pulga can easily come and sit here.”

“I see. You are proposing a double transfer!” Guzzo exclaimed in amusement. “Do ut des!^§§  . . . Very well, I shall permit it. Have you been following, Luciano Pulga? Up, shift, get a move on. Assemble your splendid chattels and betake yourself up here beside the great Cattolica, who I’m sure will be honored!”

And while Luciano, laden with his books, went past me along the aisle between the second and the third row of desks—brushing against me, he gave me a look full of bafflement and fear—a dry, imperious, sibilant “Ssh!” served to strangle a fresh crop of murmuring at birth.

To return to the complete solitude of the preceding autumn, I had still to manage one further step: to break with Luciano.

Yet at midday, after the end of school bell, when I noticed him walking all alone along the sidewalk of Via Borgoleone in front of me, painfully at a tilt because of the pile of books he carried balanced on his angular hip, I felt a moment of hesitation. It was true: I had treated him harshly and coldly all that morning in class. And yet, how come, now, I hadn’t foreseen this? I even felt I could surmise from the speed of his steps, from the neat precision with which he set down one foot after the other, that he’d guessed everything and wanted to flee. And if he did? All the better.

“Hey!” I cried out. “Wait up!”

He stopped with a jolt and turned his head back. He was very composed, the corners of his thin lips raised in a smile tinged with slightly woeful benevolence.

“Oh! It’s you.”

We walked on side by side. He said nothing to me, making no reproach, and this began to disconcert me. Where the street met Corso Giovecca, I crossed over determinedly, leaving him some yards behind.

He caught up with me on the opposite sidewalk.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in confusion. “Aren’t you going home?”

I replied that I was fed up with always taking the same route along the same streets. Today I wanted to walk with him partway to his house.

It was a Friday, market day. Corso Roma and Piazza Cattedrale were thronged with farm workers. We made our way through with difficulty, occasionally losing one another in the bustle, still without speaking a word. He doesn’t know—I thought. If I were only to allow him, at four o’clock, there he’d be, sitting beside me at my table.

Before the turning for Porta Reno, right under the clock tower on the square, I stopped.

“Goodbye,” I said.

He swallowed, then murmured, “Bye.”

Pale as a corpse, he stared at me, the sparse whiskers on his upper lip damp with sweat and his Adam’s apple in nervous agitation.

“We’ll see each other later today?” he risked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you busy?”

“Just my homework, that’s all.”

“What . . . what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. And you?”

He widened his blue eyes.

“Me?”

But I’d already turned my back on him.

14.

THE VERY morning when, in the vestibule of the Guarini School, the marks for the end of year were due to be posted, Otello Forti phoned me.

He had arrived back the evening before—he told me. He had finished his last oral exams at five-thirty in the afternoon, just in time to return to college, pack his suitcase and run to catch the train that left from Padua at seven.

I asked him how he’d done.

“Quite well, I’d say. And you?”

I replied that I didn’t know, that I was just then leaving to check the grades.

“Why not stop by at my place?” he suggested. “If you’d like we could go along together.”

He was friendly, talkative even, having acquired a light trace of a Veneto accent. But even toward him I now felt only indifference.

“Why don’t you stop by at mine and pick me up,” I said.

He tried to argue. He said that as his house was halfway between mine and the Guarini it seemed to him more “logical” that I should come round to his. And he was already less friendly, already en route to readopting his ever grumbling, despotic persona, always ready to throw himself into the most stubborn arguments when he got it into his head to get something.

“Fine. Listen,” I cut him short, “let’s meet in front of the main entrance of the Guarini in half an hour. Would that suit you?”

“Alright, alright . . . ”

Naturally I’d passed. With eights in all literary subjects, and with two sixes: in science and in math and physics. But where was I placed? First? Second? Third?

It was eleven-thirty. In the big vestibule, there was no one but ourselves. Otello only needed a glance to work out that battling for first place were me, Cattolica and Grassi. Sure, against my eight in Italian, Cattolica could only boast of a seven, and Grassi a mere six. But Cattolica had an eight in math and physics, and Grassi a nine in science . . .

“You must be second,” he concluded, “behind Cattolica by one point. Grassi’s third, also just by one point.”

Unusually solicitous and helpful, he took a pencil from his pocket and began writing on the wall beside the lists. Luciano had passed, I noted in the meantime. All sixes, but a pass just the same.

“I was right,” Otello announced at last with a flourish of triumph in his voice. “Cattolica first, and you second.”

We went out into the open air.

“Aren’t you going to phone home?”

I said it wasn’t worth the trouble. With one hand on the bicycle saddle, the other on the handlebars, I looked him up and down. If, at Christmas, he had seemed so much taller and more grown-up than me, now he appeared small, a kind of child.

“D’you want me to take you on the bike back to your house?” I proposed. “Go on, get on the crossbar.”

And in fact, like a child, he obeyed immediately.

Despite the weight, the encumbrance and the cobblestones of Via Mascheraio, I pedalled fast. I looked at the back of Otello’s neck. Beneath his blond hair, cut short, I could make out the plump, pink, tender skin. I breathed in the odor of good soap he gave off, and remembered, by contrast, Luciano’s scrawny neck, greasy with brilliantine, his big, pale, translucent, wafery ears, a bit like an old man’s. I hadn’t carried Luciano on the crossbar of my bike more than two or three times in all, Otello hundreds. And yet I understood now that there was no remedy. Even if I had forced myself to re-establish my old relations with Otello, as when we were at primary and then at the ginnasio, beneath his good, honest smell I would always sense the other, that revolting, oppressive reek of brilliantine.

As if he too had intuited that in the future we would only see each other rarely, and that from now on the clock of our friendship was ticking away, Otello didn’t stop talking for a moment. He pumped me for all kinds of information: who I’d shared a desk with during these months, whose house I’d gone to study at, who I’d become friends with. And I answered him sketchily: referring to Cattolica and to Luciano, but without informing him of anything else. His back was there in front of me, stocky and childlike. To confide in him! I felt as if I was facing a huge, steep, impervious mountain. The very idea of having to scale such a mountain of obtuseness was enough to fill me with nausea and powerlessness.

“Luciano Pulga?” asked Otello. “So who would he be? He’s not from around here?”

“No.”

“Where?”

I explained.

“And what’s he like? How does he do at school?”

“He gets by.”

“Did he pass?”

“Yes. All his marks sixes.”

On the topic of Cattolica I was less laconic. I told how it came about that we shared a desk. I even said that despite sitting next to each other we’d never really become friends.

“If nothing else he has to be clever,” Otello observed at this point. “Did you see how many eights he managed?”

We had arrived. I braked, put one foot on the ground and swiftly, as soon as he’d dismounted, Otello looked me in the eyes.

“Come in for a moment.”

I replied that I couldn’t, that I had to be going. And saying so, I pressed down on the pedals and left him.

In five minutes, I had reached my house, and having passed through the street entrance I immediately saw my mother seated in the garden under the magnolia. The sudden change from the heat outside to the cool of the entrance made me sneeze. I saw her raise her head. If I’d gone up to my room by crossing the garden—I thought—I would have had to stop to talk. It was just midday. We had plenty of time. And yet what would we have had to talk about?

I sneezed again and blew my nose. From the depths of the entrance, with my bike resting on my hip, I watched my mother half-closing her eyes. Immersed in the sun-speckled shade which gathered around the base of the magnolia, she was nothing but a remote, brightly lit spot.

She raised her arm.

“Oo-hoo!” she cried out, modulating her lovely singer’s voice in her preferred call.

I disappeared to the side to put my bike in its usual place under the stairs, turned back and said that I had to rush off to make a phone call.

“Did you pass?”

“Yes.”

“What were your marks?”

“I have to make a phone call,” I repeated.

Upstairs, I passed through one room after another until I reached my bedroom. I had only just entered when I heard my mother’s voice resound once again. She was now talking to the cook who was leaning out of the office window. When I had finished on the phone—she was saying—please ask him to come down here for a moment. And as the cook replied that I wasn’t in fact on the phone, but she thought I was in my room, my mother began to call me again. She called out my name two or three times, lingering melodiously on the vowels. Between one call and the next I heard her grumbling.

I lifted the blinds.

“I’m here.”

“Will you or won’t you, strange fellow that you are, honor us by coming down here for a moment? Go on, hurry up and do as you’re told.”

She wasn’t annoyed, far from it, not even impatient. At the heart of her realm, center-stage, surrounded by her “blessed creatures,” the poodle, Lulù, the two smoke-colored Persian cats and the tortoise Filomena, she watched me and smiled. She was sewing the hem of a sheet or a tablecloth. The needle glinted on her lap. The garden, lush as a little jungle, glowed around her.

“I got all eights,” I said, “except from Signora Krauss and Signora Fabiana. Six in science and six in physics and math.”

“Well done, darling! I can imagine how happy your father will be . . . Come down now and give me a kiss.”

She kept staring at me, gracefully tilting her head, her lips shaped in her sweetest and most alluring smile. When I showed no sign of moving from the window, she lamented, “Oh, d’you think it’s kind to make your mother beg this much for a little kiss?”

A short while before, as I was walking through one of the drawing rooms, I had stopped to look at an old, silver-framed photograph which was on top of a small table along with many other family photos. It portrayed me and my mother in 1918, during the last summer of the war. Skinny as a girl, dressed in white, my mother was kneeling beside me against the background of the vegetable garden of my grandparent’s country house at Masi Torello, where she and I had gone to stay shortly after my father had left for the Front. While she hugged me passionately to her breast, she turned in the direction of the lens an intensely joyous smile, in stark contrast to the severe and scowling expression on my chubby face, framed by long, straight hair cut in a fringe. The photo was taken by my father on one of his brief leaves from the Front—it was his masterpiece, he often said, and my mother would nod in agreement every time. Yet only a minute ago, I had understood the real meaning of that smile of my mother’s, a bride of barely three years: what it promised, what it offered, and to whom . . .

I now watched her. My mother was no longer so young, no longer so much a girl, and I felt my heart once again filling with disgust and rancor. With the rapidity of jump-cuts in a film, epic and melancholic visions of storm-beaten, lonely beaches flashed through my mind, of dizzy, unreachable mountain peaks, of virgin forests and deserts . . . Oh, to be gone from here, to flee! Not to see another soul, but most of all not to be seen by anyone else!

“So?” my mother insisted. “Do I have to stay here beneath your balcony, begging, or would His Highness prefer his faithful follower to go all the way upstairs to pay him court?”

No. I’d come down to her. We would talk. I would let her question me, until the moment my father, having returned home and seeing us, would clap his hands to let us know he was there and was in a hurry to have supper. What would it cost me to have lied for half an hour? I would behave perfectly. Every attempt on her part to sound me out would fail.

And if she needed a kiss to deceive herself that I was still a little child, her little child, she would have the kiss she sought.

“No, wait,” I replied. “I’ll come down straightaway.”

Saying this, I withdrew from the window sill.

15.

THE ULCER had begun to fester in secret. Slowly, torpidly, irremediably . . .

I was expecting no epilogue in the near future. I was neither expecting, nor hoping for any explanations whatsoever, not even concerning Luciano. And yet I did see Luciano at Cesenatico, a month and a half later. And with that meeting, I undoubtedly received an explanation of some kind.

One Sunday morning, after a sleepless night spent pacing up and down the few square meters of my little bedroom—I suffered from adolescent acne at that period—I went down to the beach very early and on my own.

It must have been eight o’clock. The vast expanse of sand appeared almost deserted. Stretched out on a deckchair beside a folded beach parasol, I finally dozed off into a fairly light sleep, as I still seemed able to register, one by one, all the small sounds that prefigured the noisy day at the seaside which was just beginning—the coming and going of beach attendants busy setting out tents and parasols, the rhythmic shouts of a group of fishermen drawing their net ashore—but no less restorative for that. And while I was thinking that at around ten I’d rouse myself and go to visit the tent where the children of the Sassòli family from Bologna were camping, and later I would go with them for the usual, very long-drawn-out swim—and then, there he was, before me.

He was standing there studying my awakening, his little skeletal body, utterly hairless, seeming even slenderer beside the abnormal swelling of his sex beneath the grey trunks. He was smiling at me.

“When did you arrive?” I asked, without getting up.

A flash of joy and gratitude lit up his eyes. So I wasn’t going to chase him away! So I’d returned to being the nice person I used to be!

“Only about half an hour ago,” he replied, with his customary lateral jutting of the jaw.

“Did you come from Ferrara?”

“That’s right.”

“But when did you leave?”

“When it was still dark!” he laughed. “At quarter to four—just imagine it—there was a local train. Chuff-chuff, chuff-chuff—it took us almost four hours to travel a hundred kilometers.”

The train—he went on, all smiles and contentment—didn’t miss out on a single station en route. It began its stops after only ten minutes: at Gaibanella. Then Montesanto. And then, one after another: Portomaggiore, Argenta, San Biagio, Lavezzola, Voltana, Alfonsine, Glorie, to “beach itself” at Ravenna, two thirds of the way through the journey, where it decided to have a rest for “a good thirty five minutes.” After Ravenna . . .

I lifted my hand.

“How did you manage to find our villa?”

“Every now and then my memory seems to work,” he replied with a smile, and winked. “I remembered the address.”

That captivating wink, rather than hinting at our intimacy during the last months, meant to reassure me that he hadn’t the least intention of reproaching me for anything. Though he did blame me. Affectionately, but still, he blamed me.

“You must be hungry,” I said. “Should I fetch you something to eat?”

There was no need. My mother—he said, glad to ramble on once more—had already prepared a snack for him. As soon as she’d seen him, she’d kindly taken the trouble to set before him “an enormous cup” of milky coffee. He’d had the coffee in the dining room, along with my brother and little sister, who had just then got out of bed. But since the two of them wouldn’t be coming to the beach before nine, and since he was keen to see me again, he’d hurried along here.

“Where did you change?”

“In your room,” he replied, slightly alarmed. “Why? It was your mother who told me I could go in there . . . ”

At this point he was sitting beside me on the sand. It was a really beautiful morning. Before us the water and the sky formed a single brightness. The boats in the distance seemed to be suspended in air.

“It’s such a great place, this,” he murmured after a long silence.

He turned back toward me for a moment, then, in a serious tone, added that he had come to Cesenatico on purpose to see me and have a talk with me. After being so friendly and kind, I had altered of late, and didn’t seem the same person. And since his father had finally managed to persuade a friend of his, an old doctor in Bologna, to rent him his medical practice—a circumstance that would force them to leave Ferrara within a month—before moving elsewhere, he’d felt the “pressing need” to come and thank me once again, hoping at the same time to dispel all those misunderstandings that might have got between us. And so, what did I have to reproach him with? He felt his conscience to be “more than clear.” In case I had believed some “stupid rumor” about him that had been put about by “malicious persons unknown” I had only to ask him, and he was ready to answer any question whatsoever.

Seated cross-legged like an Indian, he spoke without looking at me. I listened to him. I listened to the hum his words made in that huge expanse of motionless air. He’d said that he and his family were about to leave Ferrara, that we would never see each other again. Good.

“Go on,” he persisted. “First question—fire away!”

I replied that there was nothing I had to ask him, not a single thing.

He shook his head.

“Perhaps,” he sighed. “And yet I feel that you’re hiding something . . . that you’re not telling the whole truth.”

For a while he stayed silent. At last, after another sidelong glance, he asked me how I spent my days at the seaside and if, during that month or more I’d been here, some seductive married lady hadn’t assumed the responsibility of . . . of helping me lose my virginity. How many lovely and well-disposed ladies there must be in Cesanatico! Coming from the station to our house, he’d been able to ogle quite a few “luscious bits” taking a stroll along the avenues. I . . . with my physique . . . all I’d need to do was to take a look around. When on holiday, and especially at the seaside, women only think of enjoying themselves. So whoever . . . wants to enjoy himself with women . . . only has to know how to make the best of the opportunities the time and place have offered him.

I had been expecting him, sooner or later, to return to his favorite topic—I’d had that thought from the first moment I spied him through my half-closed eyelids. But the cautious, oddly anxious tone his voice had assumed was something I hadn’t foreseen.

I replied that I hadn’t encountered any married women of that kind, and this time the company I’d kept was all male, headed by some brothers called Sassòli from Bologna, and anyway, if I had sighted any such women, the spots erupting on my face would undoubtedly have stopped me from being taken into consideration.

He gave a quick look at my face and once again shook his head.

“What a weird idea!” he exclaimed happily. “You’re strikingly handsome, regardless.”

In any case—he went on—should I fail . . . ahem . . . to find anything better “out in the streets” I could always, if I wished, have recourse to him. He immediately explained. A few mornings ago, in Ferrara, while he was passing down Via Colomba, “a black-haired beauty” in her dressing-gown leaning out from a first-floor window in the Pensione Mafarka had greeted him with a big smile accompanied by a suggestive gesture. They hadn’t actually exchanged any words. But he was sure all he needed to do was to introduce himself one morning wearing long trousers—his mother had resisted buying them for him, but within a week he’d be able to persuade her—better still if he was accompanied by a friend . . . and she, the dark haired doll, would let us “sample the goods” gratis. If the idea appealed—and he stared me in the eyes—I could be that friend.

“Couldn’t you invent some excuse to make a trip to Ferrara”—he relentlessly pursued the topic—“that woman, you’ll see, would not only let us in, but take us up to her bedroom together.”

I looked away and up at the sky. As on every morning at that time, a military aircraft was flying over, some way out from the coast. In the distance, the silver cockpit of the Savoia-Marchetti glinted in the sunlight. How many kilometers out was it from the shore? I reckoned that those four fishing vessels far out at sea, motionless on the horizon, must have had the plane overhead.

I stretched and yawned.

“No,” I replied. “First of all, I don’t have any long trousers either. And then the idea of a threesome doesn’t appeal to me. I would never do it.”

“You don’t like the idea of a threesome?” he stammered, staring at me, pallid as a drowned man. “But I . . . ”

He added nothing more. He started examining the sand in front of his pointed knees.

I too remained silent. Suddenly I stood up.

“Would you like to take out a rowing boat?”

He lifted his face with an enquiring look.

“Gladly,” he replied and was already getting to his feet. “But don’t forget I can’t swim.”

“Never fear. Should the need arise, I’ll save you.”

I rowed. At some hundred meters from the shore, I spotted my mother in a skirt and short sleeved blouse standing in the doorway of the Adele Baths, having just arrived there from our house. With her right hand, she was holding Fanny’s hand. With her left hand raised, she was screening her eyes from the sun. Not seeing us under the beach umbrella, she must have quickly surmised that we were in the sea and was trying to work out where.

“Oo-hoo!” I cried, waving an arm above my head.

“Oo-hoo!” she replied. “Oo-hoo!”

“Who is it? Your mother?” Luciano asked.

I didn’t reply. I had begun rowing again vigorously, my eyes fixed on my mother, who was already making her way toward our beach cabin. By now she was tiny. In a short while, when she left the cabin wearing her beautiful blue Janzen swimsuit, she would be no more than an indistinguishable speck.

When we had gone about a kilometer from the beach, I stepped up on to the seat and dived in the water. Left alone on the dipping and rolling boat, at first Luciano was overcome by panic. He gripped the seat, looking around bewildered. But he soon seemed to calm down, and I was aware he’d begun to follow my maneuvers in the water attentively and admiringly.

“You looked like a motorboat,” he said as soon as I’d climbed back aboard. “What do you call that stroke you were doing?”

“The crawl.”

“What is it? Does it come from America?”

“From Hawaii.”

“I can believe it!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “Last week I was at the canal by Via Darsena to watch a swimming race. No one swam like you, making all that foam with your feet. Is it hard to learn, the crawl?”

“Not that hard.”

I tried to explain to him how you needed to coordinate your feet with your head and arms.

“And who taught you how to do it?” he asked when I’d finished.

“No one,” I replied.

In the meantime I’d started rowing again.

“And what now?” Luciano asked in a melancholic tone, realizing that we were once more heading for the open sea. “Aren’t we going to turn back?”

“With the sea this calm it’ll be worth the effort to get as far as the nearest fishing boats.”

I nodded with my chin toward two of the four fishing vessels that I’d noticed from the shore, and that were now fairly close. If we were alongside when they draw in their nets—I said—perhaps they’d give us some fish to make soup with.

“But apart from the soup,” I added, “can’t you see how beautiful it is?”

And it was, after all, beautiful. I can hardly remember a sea so calm and so flat—rather than floating on the water it seemed that we were flying, gliding slowly through the air. Was that the shore out there opposite? Hazy, with the blue hills behind, I could barely recognize it.

Luciano too had his head turned toward the distant shore. Silent, shut in his thoughts, he seemed to have forgotten about me.

I watched him. And suddenly, there, in the fiery motionless air, I was shaken by a strange cold shiver. I didn’t fully understand. I felt uneasy, suddenly at the edge of things, in some way excluded, and precisely because of that, envious, wretched and petty . . .

And what if, instead, I’d spoken my mind to Luciano? I wondered, staring at his thin, lonely back, a little reddened by the sun above his shoulder blades. If I had been decisive, accepting his recent suggestion, had roughly placed him and myself in front of the truth, the whole truth? Not for an hour yet would the offshore wind begin to make the water choppy. There would be no shortage of time.

And yet in the very moment when, facing his sorry bare back, suddenly distant, unreachable in its solitude, I gave way to these thoughts, already, then, something was telling me that if Luciano Pulga might be able to accept this encounter with the truth, I would not. Slow to understand, nailed by birth to a destiny of exclusion and resentment, it was useless to think I’d ever be able to throw open the door behind which I was yet again hiding. I just couldn’t do it—there was no remedy. Not now. Not ever.

^* The Italian school system in Bassani’s day comprised elementare for students aged six to ten years old; ginnasio inferiore or lower ginnasio (three classes) for students eleven to thirteen years old; ginassio superiore or upper ginnasio (two classes) for students fourteen to fifteen years old; and liceo (three classes) for students sixteen to eighteen years old. The pupils in this novel have just graduated from upper ginnasio to the first year of the liceo (within the same school) and therefore are around fifteen to sixteen years old (with the exception of two older boys who are resitting the year).

^† “Death vanquishes the body/ Virtue conquers death.”

^‡ Pulga is quoting Dante’s Inferno, canto ii, where Virgil in Limbo says he is “tra color che son sospesi”: among those suspended.

^§ “Conveyed through many lands and over many seas,” Catullus, 101.

^¶ “Sparrow, my darling’s pet,” Catullus, 2.

^# Sub tegmine manuum: under the cover of (your) hand (Latin).

^** Silvio Pellico (1789– 1854): a writer, poet and Italian patriot.

^†† Ferrarese dialect: “up to his thighs in shit.”

^‡‡ Dante, Inferno, canto iv: “che vola sopra gli altri come un’aquila” speaking of Homer’s stylistic superiority.

^§§ Latin for “I give that you may give”— more or less equivalent to English use of the Latin tag quid pro quo.