The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (24 page)

“El ga*
for over forty years, but it’d still pull up a regiment.”

“It must be a Westinghouse,” I hazarded, at random.

“Well,
sogio mit
. . .” he muttered, “. . . one of those names.”

Then he started telling me how and when it had been “fixed up”. But the lift, stopping suddenly, made him break off almost at once, with obvious regret.

_-----------------------------------

* It’s been going: Venetian dialect. t 
What do I know:
 Venetian dialect.

In my state of mind just then, one of temporary, undeluded calm, Micol’s welcome surprised me like an unexpected, undeserved present. I had been afraid she would be nasty to me, and treat me with the cruel indifference she had lately shown. But as soon as I entered her room (after bringing me there, Perotti closed the door discreetly behind me), I saw at once that she was smiling at me kindly, sweetly, like a friend. Even more than her explicit invitation to come forward, it was this luminous smile of hers, so full of tenderness and of forgiveness, that persuaded me to move away from the dark end of the room, closer to her.

So I went up to the bed, and stayed at the foot of it, my hands resting on the bar. Although she was tucked inside the bedclothes, the whole of Micol’s top half was outside. She was wearing a dark green pullover, with a high neck and long sleeves, the little gold medal of the
sciaddai
glittering on the wool, and two pillows propping her up behind. When I went in she was reading: a French novel, I noticed, recognizing the kind of cover, red and white, from a distance; and it was reading, probably, more than the cold that had sketched a line of tiredness under her eyes. No, she was still beautiful-I said to myself, as I looked at her-perhaps she had never been so beautiful and so attractive.

Beside the bed, at the height of the bolster, was a two-tiered wooden trolley, the top tier taken up by an articulated lamp, turned on, the telephone, a red china teapot, two white china cups with gold rims, and a white copper thermos flask. Micol leant out to lay her book on the lower shelf, then turned, looking for the hanging electric light switch on the opposite side of the bedhead. Poor soul, she muttered away meantime-she shouldn’t keep me in such a morgue ! And as soon as the light went on she greeted it with a big “aah” of satisfaction.

Then she went on talking, more Finzi-Continian than ever: about the “squalid” cold that had kept her in bed for a good four days; about the aspirins with which, without Papa finding out, as he was no less bitterly opposed than uncle Giulio to things that made you sweat (bad for the heart, according to them, but this just wasn’t true!), she’d vainly tried to ward it off; about what a bore it was to lie interminably in bed, without wanting to do a damn thing, without even wanting to read. Ah, reading: at one time, when she was constantly ill with ’flu and a high fever at thirteen, she was quite capable of devouring, say, the whole of 
War and Peace
in a few days, or the whole cycle of 
The Three Musketeers,
whereas now, throughout an entire wretched cold, although admittedly it was a cold in the head, all she could manage to polish off was the odd French novel, the kind with very large print. Did I know Cocteau’s
Les Enfants Terribles?-she
asked, picking the book up from the trolley again and holding it out to me. It wasn’t bad, it was amusing and
chic.
But could you compare it with
The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After,
and
The Vicomte de Bragelonne?
Ah, now those were really novels! You’d got to admit it: after all, even from the point of view of
chic*
they were “the very bestest” .

Suddenly she broke in on herself.

“Well, but what are you stuck over there for?” she exclaimed. “Heavens alive, you’re worse than a child! Take that armchair” (and she pointed it out) “and come and sit down here beside me.”

I hastened to obey, but it wasn’t enough. Now I’d
got
to drink something.

“What can I offer you?” she said. “Would you like tea?”

“No, thanks,” I answered, “I just don’t feel like it before supper. It rinses out the tum, and takes away my appetite.”

“A little
Skiwasser,
maybe?”

“The same thing goes for that as well.”

“It’s boiling, you know! Ifl’m not mistaken you’ve only tried the summer version, the iced stuff that’s really
heretical: Himbeerwasser.”

“No, no, thanks.”

“Oh dear,” she moaned. “Shall I ring and have you brought an aperitif? We never have them ourselves, but I expect there must be a bottle of Campari somewhere around. Perotti,
honni soit
, is bound to be able to find it. ...”

I shook my head.

“Really not anything!” she exclaimed disappointedly. “What a fellow!”

“I pre fe r not. ’ ’

I said “I prefer not” and she burst out laughing.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked, a bit hurt.

She was looking at me as if taking in my real appearance for the first time.

“You said ‘I prefer not’ like Bartleby. With the same face.”

“Bartleby? And who might he be?”

“Well, obviously you haven’t read Melville’s stories.”

All I’d read of Melville, I said, was
Moby Dick,
translated by Cesare Pavese. Then she asked me to get up and from the bookcase opposite, the one between the two windows, bring
Piazza Tales
over to her. As I searched the books she told me the plot of the story. Bartleby was a clerk-she said-a clerk employed by a well-known New York lawyer (a very good man at his job: active, capable, liberal, “one of those nineteenth-century Americans Spencer Tracy does so well”) to copy out office papers, legal documents, and so on and so forth. Now so long as they kept him writing, this Bartleby was quite prepared to slave away conscientiously. But if Spencer Tracy got it into his head to give him some little extrajob, like collating a copy with the original text, or popping down to the post office on the corner to buy a stamp, he wouldn’t hear of it: he just smiled evasively and answered, politely but firmly: “I prefer not to.”*

“But why?” I asked, coming back with the book. “Because he wasn’t going to be anything but a clerk. A clerk, and that was all.”

“But heavens,” I objected, “I suppose Spencer Tracy was paying him a regular wage?”

“Of course,” said Micol. “But what’s that got to do with it? Wages pay for work, but not for the
person 
who does it.”

“I just don’t understand,” I said. “Spencer Tracy’d taken Bartleby on as a clerk, it’s true, but he’d also got him to help keep the wheels turning in a general way as well, I suppose. What was he really asking him? A 
bit more
that was really a
bit less.
A man who’s got to sit still all day should find a trip to the post office on the corner just what he needs: a distraction, a pause, or in any case a marvellous chance to stretch his legs a bit. No, I’m sorry. I’ve got a feeling Spencer Tracy had every reason to ask this Bartleby of yours to stop being such a bore and get on with what he’d told him to.” We argued at some length about poor Bartleby and Spencer Tracy. She reproached me for not
understanding,
for being so banal, the usual old inveterate conformist. Conformist? She carried on joking. The fact remained that at the start, with a pitying air, she’d compared me with Bartleby. Now she’d swapped sides, seeing I was on the side of the “wretched employers”, and had taken to exalting in Bartleby the “inalienable right of every human being to non-collaboration”, that is to freedom. In fact, strike high or strike low she kept criticizing me, for completely opposite reasons.

The telephone rang at one point. It was the kitchen ringing up to know if and when they should bring up her supper tray. Micol said she wasn’t hungry for the moment, and would ring them back later. Would she like some
minestra in brodo
?-she answered, with a grimace, to a definite question. Yes, she would. But they mustn’t start getting it ready now, please: “longterm cooking” was something she couldn’t bear.

She put down the telephone and turned back to me, staring at me with eyes that were at once sweet and serious, and for a few seconds said nothing.

“How’s things?” she asked at last, in a low voice.

I swallowed.

So-so.

I smiled and looked round.

“It’s fuimy how every detail in this room is exactly the way I’d imagined it,” I said. “There’s the Recamier sofa, for instance. It’s as i.f I’d already seen it. But in any case I
have
seen it.”

I told her about the dream I’d had six months before, the night before she left for Venice. I pointed out the rows of
lattimi,
gleaming shadowy on their shelves: the only things in the room-I said-that had looked different in my dream from the way they were in fact. I explained the way I’d seen them, and she listened to me seriously, attentively, without interrupting.

When I had finished she stroked the sleeve of my jacket, caressing it lightly. Then I knelt down beside the bed, took her in my arms, kissed her on the neck, on the eyes, on the lips. And she let me do it, but staring at me all the time and all the time trying, with small movements of her head, to stop me kissing her on the mouth.

“No ... no . . .” she kept saying. “Stop . .. please. •..

Do be good. . . . No, no ... someone might come in. . . . No.”

It was no good. Gradually, first one leg, then the other, I got up on the bed. My full weight was now pressed down on her, and blindly I went on kissing her face, only very rarely able to touch her lips, and even less able to make her lower her eyelids. At last I hid my face in her neck. And while my body, as if quite on its own, was moving convulsively on top of hers, that lay still as a statue under the bedclothes, all at once, with a sudden appalling wrench that shook my whole self, I knew quite definitely that I was losing her, that I had lost her.

She was the first to speak.

“Please get up,” I heard her saying, very close to my ear. “I can’t breathe like this.”

I was quite literally laid out. Getting off the bed seemed beyond my strength. But I had no choice.

I pulled myself on to my feet. I swayed a few steps about the room. At last I droppped into the armchair beside the bed again, and hid my face in my hands. My cheeks were burning.

“Why d’you behave like that?” asked Micol. “In any case, i t’ s no use. ”

“Why’s it no use?” I asked, looking up sharply. “May I know why?”

She looked at me with the ghost of a smile.

“Won’t you go in there a minute?” she said, waving at the bathroom door. “You’re all red,
impiza
red.* * 
From
 
impizare
: 
“to inflame” in Ferrarese dialect. 
Wash your face.”

“Thanks, yes. Maybe I’d better.”

I leapt up and went towards the bathroom. But just at that moment, the door that gave on to the stairs was shaken vigorously. Someone seemed to be heaving at it with his shoulders.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“It’ s Yor, ”Mico 1 answered calmly. “Go and open it. ’ 

In the oval glass above the basin I saw my face I reflected.

I examined it carefully, as if it weren’t mine, as if it belonged to someone else. Although I had plunged it repeatedly in cold water, it was still “red,
impiza 
red”, as Micol had said, with darker marks between my nose and my upper lip, at the top and around the cheekbones. Carefully objective, I looked at the large well-lit face before me, gradually attracted by the throbbing arteries under the skin of my forehead and temples, or by the thick net of tiny scarlet veins that, when I opened my eyes wide, seemed to squeeze the blue discs of the irises tight, or by the beard, growing thicker on the chin and along thejaw, or by some tiny, scarcely visible pimple. . . . I wasn’t really thinking of anything. Through the thin dividing wall I could hear Micol talking on the telephone. With whom! With the servants in the kitchen, presumably, telling them to bring up her supper. That would certainly make our farewells less embarrassing for both of us.