Tie the Straps Tight

The closer the community the more elaborate the role the outsider must play, as he tries to appear one of the crowd. All his life a stage where our hero pretends he’s an extra. Tricky! Then one day you forget your lines…. Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles. A town transformed into a theatre, when its citizens feign ignorance of what they know.

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In all communities, but especially small ones - none smaller than an elite - everyone has to fit in; which brings great benefits, and adds style to our lives, raising us to heights we’d not otherwise reach. You know there are costs. Under the ballgown there is a corset we’d love to unlace…. If we are different, if our tastes are exotic or refined or a little outré, we twist ourselves out of shape to adapt to local mores; mores that civilise a place, by squeezing out the crudities of the stupid and ignorant. What a double-bind! for the outsider, who benefits greatly from such civility. Customs do restrain us - I cannot kiss you in the plaza or criticise your politics at a dinner party - but they also save us from the abuse of the local scum, held in check by the authority of good taste: few wish to be signposted ‘barbarian’. And we should remember this, when campaigning to take out a civilisation. It’s not only the best or the odd that a culture holds down; it sits on the worst, and suffocates it. No civilised person wants to listen to this from Signora Lavezzoli.

Oh that Deliliers - she would then comment from her tent to ours, though addressing my mother in particular: believing she had lowered her voice, perhaps, so as not to let the children hear, but in fact talking louder than ever - that Deliliers was nothing but a spoilt boy, a lout that military service would do a great deal of good to. But Dr Fadigati, no. A man of his class, of his age, was in no way excusable. Well, so he had special tastes? He was ‘like that’? What of it! No one had ever made a fuss over it before. But to come and make an exhibition of himself here at Riccione, where of course he knew people would know him; to come and make a spectacle of himself here, while everywhere in Italy there were thousands of beaches where there would be absolutely no danger of meeting a single person from Ferrara! No, really: only someone really filthy (and as she said this Signora Lavezzoli’s big blue eyes would shoot great flames of authentic indignation) only a ‘real degenerate’ - she went on - would do a thing like that.

It’s hard fitting in. No question. Natural desires, with the impulses they generate, have to be tightly controlled; making us wary and self-conscious, as we put on an act, look into the mirror of another’s face to witness the quality of our performance. Too aware of this other gaze, we check our tie, the buttons of our shirt, the zip on our velvet trousers.…To feel always out of place, while everyone else seems so at home. There are times we resent it. Why must we perform! Other times we revel in our otherness. What a character we are! The talk of the town; someone very special indeed. Nevertheless the restrictions exist, and we chafe at them. Why can’t I kiss him in the street? Why must I pretend to share her prejudices? There are times you want to take off the makeup, come down from the stage. Today I’m going to be like everybody else…yet always that quick look into another’s eyes: why can’t I be ordinary! But then ordinary is dull. Those eyes, their scrutiny excites, enlivens; you feel so intense. Wow! You enjoying it! However, even this enervates, for, going on too long, it exhausts, is tiresome, bores. To shut off the pantechnicon inside your head. This is the dream. Just a bit of relax time.

The dream is likely to turn into a nightmare.

Dr Fadigati gives in. He surrenders to desire and suffers the tragic fate of all outsiders who cross the border that separates the queer from the conventional. Seduced by a young Apollo he lets himself go, advertising his sexuality to his neighbours. He is rubbing his vice into our faces, they say; if only - it is a refrain - he’d take his buck somewhere else, but to stay here, where we can see him…well, he is forcing us to be nasty. Yet they don’t want to behave as savages. Always to camouflage that moral stain. It is why life gets tense. In being himself Dr Fadigati forces others to act a part in his presence, as they pretend not to notice his predilections. How necessary to feel natural, be a creature of instinct; for thinking a strain, we resent those who force us into such abnormal activity. The weight of this self-consciousness too heavy to bear, we transfer the weight to a man used to carrying such hefty loads: blame doc! The narrator, more insightful than his friends, knows that it is Deliliers, Dr Fadigati’s lover, who is responsible for this exposure. Deliliers is malicious; humiliating a man whom he shags for money, he is using this infatuation to destroy the good doctor by turning the community against him.

A highly civilised man, like the narrator’s father, is above this general contempt; and invites the outcast to his beach tent, where they talk literature and art and philosophy. Such civility has its limits. When Dr Fadigati pleads with his wilful lover in the hotel lobby, and Deliliers punches him in the face, the scandal is too much, and even this gentleman must succumb to the pressure of his wife. In closed communities it is the women, so sensitive to status, their antennae attuned to received wisdom, its signals of respectability, who enforce the codes of opinion and conduct. Gossip the housewife’s arsenal; here used to smash the doctor’s reputation. Dr Fadigati is to be ostracised. No one to come to his clinic, even though the best in the city, and he has known these people for decades.

For years they didn’t know Dr Fadigati was gay. Then the rumours started, and it became common knowledge; which explained those sightings in dark alleys, his presence in the cheap seats in the cinema, close to the toilets; and his nighttime excursions…. “He’s one of them!” The curiosity he once excited evaporates, and his sexuality accepted is safely labelled and can be ignored. Turning a blind eye to his vice they’ll continue to welcome him as ‘one of us’. It is the humanity of a civilised place, the superior ethics of a prosperous community, where one believes one’s self a paragon. That said, there has been a significant change; an instinctive relationship has turned self-conscious; and touched by artifice everybody now plays a role.

They smiled, all the same. As if they were not too sorry to have noticed Dr Fadigati’s weakness so late in the day (imagine, it had taken them more than ten years to notice it!) but, in a way, reassured.

In fact, they exclaimed, shrugging their shoulders, one had to admit that even in the most shameful irregularity the man had style.

What most persuaded them to be indulgent towards Fadigati, and, after the first moment of alarmed bewilderment, almost to admire him, was just this question of his style. By style they meant chiefly one thing: his discretion, the way he had always been so obviously careful - and continued being so - to hide his tastes, not to give scandal. Yes, they said: now that his secret was no longer a secret, now that everything about him was clear, they knew at last how to treat hm. By day, in the sunlight, to take off their hats to him at once; at night, even if it meant squeezing up against the crowd in Via San Romano, to look as if he was a stranger. Like Fredric March in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr Fadigati had two lives. But who hasn’t?

Knowing meant understanding, not being curious any longer, letting the matter drop.

Dr Fadigati is discrete. With his excellent practice, his refined manners, that intelligence, his homosexuality is reduced to a mere trait of personality; a little distasteful, perhaps, but not important, especially as the best people are his patients. And he’s so cultivated. How can they not like Dr Fadigati? But what about the good doctor himself? How does it feel to constantly play a part, to hold yourself in, not show flash an authentic self? The narrator glimpses the truth.

And if we looked back at the stationary train, we saw Dr Fadigati at once behind the thick windows of his carriage, watching people crossing the lines and hurrying back to the third-class compartments. From the expression of heartfelt envy on his face, from the regretful looks with which he followed the movements of the small rural crowd we found such a bore, he seemed little less than a recluse: some important prisoner being transferred to Ponza or Tremiti to stay there heaven knows how long.

The loneliness is enormous. His weakness to think there’s a way out. That, and his natural instinct to be part of the crowd, to let himself go a little, leads to a fateful error. While travelling on the train Dr Fadigati gets close to a group of students. Attracted to these teenagers - with their vitality, their intelligence, their freedom, and tolerance (and perhaps their looks) - he shares their compartment on his trips to Bologna. It is a foolish thing to do. He should not be here. Bound to give himself away. Only with distance can he keep his respect, retain an authority that keeps the rumours, the gossip, the moral ugliness of the conventionally moral at bay. For an adult to hang around adolescents is to threaten that authority; for naturally he tries to please, be one of them…. Then there’s something disturbing about an adult who acts the immature. The students are uneasy, and disrespect creeps in. A middle-aged man is out of place here. This feeling slowly merges with that background prejudice against his sexuality, to which Deliliers makes explicit reference. Dr Fadigati, in coming too close, touches these teenagers with a sense of the alien, which both intrigues and creates unease. By pushing his difference onto these lads, he is forcing them to think about their feelings, reflect on their prejudices, deal with their own disgust; he is bringing out the bad, which nobody likes to see. The more self-conscious they become the harder Dr Fadigati tries to be natural; he lets himself go; there are allusions to his loves…it is a chance for Deliliers to be crude: can you look at my cock doctor, I think I’ve got an infection. A nasty atmosphere. Both have gone too far. His time here must end, for the situation has transgressed the bounds of respectability; it is also breaking apart the group, whose attraction is its conformity, that feeling that all are the same.

The narrator is also feeling like an outcast. The difficulties of Dr Fadigati are fusing with those of Italy, as Mussolini’s race laws take effect. The good doctor’s fate to be the narrator’s own: once on Ferrara’s streets he feels the eyes of a goy upon him. Deliliers has exposed his lover. Fascists are putting the mark on Jews. It is why for a few weeks the narrator feels close to the doctor. It cannot last. They inhabit different worlds; and anyway, there is still hope and illusion: surely the best families in this city - most of them Jewish - can’t be removed. This is Italy. We are more humane, more civilised than those barbarous Germans…. 

Although to us this belief seems desperate it is not lunatic. Given the history, their power, their influence, it would have seemed impossible that an elite could be wiped out by the local scum; that a Signora Lavezzoli should have the last word. Surely no society could be ruled by a Deliliers.

Review: The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles