29	LUKÁCS’S SLIPPERS

Gianpiero was a Germanist. He studied a great deal of German literature with Claudio Magris. Magris was his master, in a manner of speaking. About Danube, Gianpiero used to say, “Yes, interesting . . . it’s all cribbed from Baedeker.”

So Gianpiero was headed for a brilliant career as a Germanist.

At Easter in 1969 or 1970—I don’t recall—we went with two friends of ours, Paola and Giorgio, to Budapest in a car. And we went to visit Gyorgy Lukács. We rang him up, and a maid answered; then he came to the telephone, and I asked him in German if we could pay him a visit. I wasn’t yet known outside Italy. Lukács had been here in Turin to give a lecture in the great hall of the university a few years before, but I hadn’t met him.

He lived on an upper floor, across from the Chain Bridge with windows on the Danube. I remember that we were waiting for him in the living room, and he arrived carrying a pair of slippers; maybe he had just returned home. He pulled on his slippers in front of us and we began to chat.

I could already speak German fairly well, and Gianpiero very well. I had just given an esthetics course on Ernst Bloch—art and utopia—so I began to discuss Bloch with Lukács, and he said “Yes, yes, Bloch, of course.” But the unspoken message seemed to be “Bloch was a great thinker, and above all a poet, but . . . he was a bit of a poseur” (dava un po’ i numeri; in Piedmontese the verb would be davanare). He spoke to us about the book he was writing, The Ontology of Social Being.

So Gianpiero began to get passionately interested in Hungarian. He hadn’t done his thesis yet. Back in Italy, he began to write his thesis in Hungarian with a professor, Paolo Santarcangeli, a great friend of Leo Valiani, the sort of people with connections to the Partito d’Azione wing of the resistance. Santarcangeli was from Fiume and knew Hungarian because of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A real personality. Very worldly, very elegant, a bon vivant, rich. He was ninety years old, had been president of the fashion association, had written a book on the voyage to the underworld, and was studying labyrinths.

I am glad, today—it consoles me a little for the uncompletedness that scandalizes me about his life—that Gianpiero was able to frequent personalities like that. Like Santarcangeli. Or like Cesare Cases, who was a great literary scholar, even though he was an Einaudi snob to the core of his being. The Einaudi publishing house had the rights to the works of Nietzsche but always refused to publish him. It came to the point that when a group from Einaudi left to found the new publishing house Adelphi, the rights went with them.

Through Cases’s daughter, who had also become a student of Hungarian, there was this sort of friendship between Cases, Gianpiero, and me.

Gianpiero became associate professor of Hungarian and had a few students, Bruno Ventavoli among them. Gianpiero was one of those who had discovered Sandor Marai. When he died Gianpiero was writing a book on Marai (I still have fragments of it). In Italy, no had ever heard of Marai. Gianpiero also wrote a book on Hungarian Jewish culture, Fuori dal ghetto, for Edizioni E / O.

He had a lot to teach me about literature. He understood it better than Magris—I’m not impartial, I know, but I am also rationally convinced of this—and without knowing it he was a “weak thinker” in his reading, which challenged Magris, of the German classics. Whereas Magris, for example, warmed to the young Hofmannsthal’s Letter of Lord Chandos, Gianpiero read Hofmannsthal as an instance of the so-called Potemkin effect, after the prince of Crimea who painted poverty and desolation over with picturesque village facades when Empress Catherine II came to visit.

In 1976 we decided to look for a house in Turin, and I found an attic in Via Mazzini, a beautiful place, in the same building in which Felice Casorati had had his studio in the 1930s. There was a sort of little house that divided the courtyard in two, and it was there that Casorati had lived and worked.

By now we lived with just one cat, because we were unable to bring them all into town. In any case they were used to being outdoors and had never seen a litter box. But abandoning them was a tremendous wrench.

One of the things for which I can’t forgive myself is that I didn’t bring Carpaccio into town. Carpaccio was a lazy plump little cat. He looked like Garfield. A glutton, colored off-white. He wasn’t a beautiful cat, but he was unusually affectionate, and we called him Carpaccio because he looked like one of those animals, a bit shapeless, that you see on the floor at the bottom of Carpaccio’s paintings.

We abandoned him the morning we moved house. When he saw the movers arriving to take the furniture away he bolted, and when he came back there was nobody there any more. I hope cats don’t have long memories.

More than once I’ve gone by our old house, making cat noises and calling him to see if he might pop into view. But he didn’t trust our car any more.