Read Online The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani - Free Book Online

foot in the university), wasn't this simply marvellous weather? As long as it lasted, it would be a crime not to take advantage of it.
    These last words were spoken with less conviction: it seemed as if some unhappy thought had come to him all at once, or else that, quite suddenly and without reason, he was bored by the thought of my coming, and hoped I’d take no notice of his invitation.
    I thanked him, without promising anything definite. Why had he telephoned? I wondered, with astonishment, as I put back the receiver. Since he and his sister had been sent to study outside Ferrara (Alberto in ’33, Micol in ’34: about the time professor Ermanno had had permission from the Jewish community to do up “for the use of his family and of those who might possibly be interested”, the ex-Spanish synagogue incorporated in the buildings of the synagogue via Mazzini, since when the seat behind ours, in the Italian synagogue, had remained strictly empty) we had seen each other only very rarely, and always fleetingly and from a distance. We had become such strangers, during that time, that one morning in 1935, on the station at Bologna (I was in my second year at the university, reading Italian, and went there and back every day by train), when a tall dark pale youth with a plaid rug over his arm and a porter loaded with suitcases at his heels hurtled violently into me on platform one as he dashed for the just-leaving Milan express, I didn’t even faintly recognize Alberto Finzi-Contini right away. When we reached the end of the train he turned to hurry the porter, at the same time giving me an absent-minded glance as I turned to protest and vanishing into the carriage. That time-I kept thinking-he hadn’t even felt the need to greet me. And so why such smarmy friendliness now?
    “Who was it?” asked my father, the minute I got back into the dining-room.
    There was no one else in the room. He was sitting in the armchair beside the wireless, waiting anxiously, as usual, for the two o’clock news.
    “Alberto Finzi-Contini.”
    “Who? The boy? Well, how condescending ! And what does he want?”
    He gazed at me with his blue, bewildered eyes, which had long ago lost hope of influencing me, or of guessing what was going through my head. He knew perfectly well-he told me with his eyes-that his questions annoyed me, that his everlasting efforts to poke his nose into my life were indiscreet and unreasonable. But, good God, wasn't he my father? And couldn't I see how he'd aged, this last year? My mother and Fanny he couldn’t trust: they were women. Nor Ernesto either: he was too small. So who was he to talk to? Could I possibly not realize that I was just the one he needed ?
    I clenched my teeth and told him what it was all about.
    “Well, are you going?”
    He gave me no time to answer. Right away, warming up the way he did every time he got a chance of dragging me into any kind of conversation-and if it was on politics all the better-he plunged headlong into “getting things straight”.
    Unfortunately it was true-he began burbling, tirelessly: on September 22nd, after the first official announcement on the 9th, all the newspapers had published that additional circular from the party secretary about various “practical measures” the provincial Federations should take right away with regard to us. In future, “mixed marriages were to be strictly forbidden, all young people known to belong to the Jewish race were to be excluded from the state schools of every kind and level”, and denied the “high honour” of compulsory military service; and we Jews could no longer announce deaths in the newspaper, have our names in the telephone directory, have Aryan servants, or belong to “leisure-time clubs” of any kind. And yet, in spite of that . . . .
    “I hope you’re not going to trot out the usual stuff,” I broke in at this point, shaking my head.
    “What stuff?”
    “About