A Touch of Tastelessness

There is a line we cannot cross, though its decades before we see it. A phrase, her tone, that feel for an idea, the grace of her walk, those blond curls bouncing and bubbling on a slender neck, her sandy promontory. Signs we cannot read, in the flush of first excitement, this adventure in newfound lands. But I’m smart, you say; I’d see them if real. Klutz! Such signs are more like modes of being; they cling to their upbringing as a silk dress to Micòl’s hips and breasts. Spend time on the quality of the material, on the design, do you? Pshaw! You’re looking at the hips swing, how those breasts rise up the valley to that beautiful face; its babbling brook of talk, sunlit by laughter, star-shone by smiles. The way she moves: an instinct. That way an idea rolls around her head: less learned than manicured, in the boudoir of her life. One’s senses; one’s habits; a fine-tuned training to one’s pedigree: these are acquired with the minimum calculation but the maximum of taste. Sprezzatura a quality of the highest virtue. An aristocrat knows a thoroughbred on sight. So natural they don’t notice what they do, think it at all special. Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. But you, you think about it all the time. Insiders-outsiders. Always that moment when you see that line.

_________

There are moments when friendship can turn to love; when two high-strung sensibilities are suddenly on the same wavelength. The moment evanescent, it’s easily missed, quickly fumbled, for it is a delicate scene, hard to keep one’s equilibrium, adjust the self to swiftly changing circumstances: in a flash you must choose the prefect phrase, select the right gesture, unlock a closely guarded door. Turning a still photograph into moving film…a time for decisions when there’s no time to decide. Oh dear! Self-conscious and constrained we suffer mental arthritis, just when we need the fluidity of grace. We become timid, doubts fill us like coffee a cafetière. What to do! Suddenly words are pebbles on a beach, over which the tongue stumbles. Thinking about what to say - or should I touch her hand, stroke that wrist, kiss a cheek? - the moment goes, her feelings change, those fingers, once fluttering over the radio’s dial, now turn that dial to a different channel. Lost. The more sensitive, subtle, intelligent, the closer we are as friends, the harder to connect in love, as the reflex naturalness of the relationship is put under the spotlight of our own lust. Innocence goes down to a penetrating gaze. The timing is impossible to gauge. The moment never feels quite right, the emotions never quite in sync: the closer the friendship, the more sensitive and sophisticated the feelings, the harder to meet on the same territory at the same time. Micòl once had a crush on our narrator. Now he’s in love with her; but this revelation is too sudden, too overwhelming, for him to act with the required spontaneity. The very delicacy of his sensibility ensures he talks too much, says the silliest things.

She drew close to the carriage. Its appearance was just as shiny and efficient as the car’s.

‘D’you recognize it?’

She opened one of the doors, got in and sat down. Then, patting the material of the seat next to her, she invited me to do likewise.

I accordingly entered and sat on her left. No sooner had I made myself comfortable than, slowly turning on its hinges with the sheer force of inertia, the carriage door shut on its own with the dry, precise click of a trap.

Now the beating of the rain on the coach-house roof became inaudible. It truly seemed as though we were in a small drawing room, a cramped and suffocating one.

‘How well you’ve kept it,’ I said, unable to suppress the sudden emotion which registered in my voice as a slight tremor. ‘It still seems new. The only thing missing is a vase of flowers.’

‘Oh, as for flowers, Perotti sees that they’re in place when he takes Grandma out.’

‘So you still use it then!’

‘Not more than two or three times a year and only for a tour of the garden.’

‘And the horse? Is it still the same one?

‘Still the same old Star. He’s twenty-two. Didn’t you see him, the other day, at the back of the stall? By now he’s half-blind, but harnessed to the carriage, he still cuts a…lamentable figure.’

She burst of laughing, shaking her head.

‘Perotti has a real mania about this carriage,’ she continued bitterly. ‘And it’s mainly to please him (he hates and despises motor cars - you’ve no idea how much!} that every now and then we let him take Grandma our for a ride up and down the driveways. Every fortnight or so he’s in here with buckets of water, sponges, doeskins and rug-bearers - and that explains the miracle, that’s why the carriage, especially when seen at dusk, still manages more or less to hoodwink everyone.’

‘More or less?’ I protested. ‘But it looks brand new.’

She snorted with boredom.

‘Do me a favour, and don’t talk drivel.’

Spurred by some unpredictable impulse, she brusquely moved away, and huddled up in her corner. Her brow furrowed, her features sharpened with the same rancorous look with which, sometimes when playing tennis, and utterly focused on winning, she would stare straight ahead. Suddenly she seemed to have grown ten years older. 

We stayed for a few moments like this, in silence. Then, without changing position, her arms hugging her sun-tanned knees as though she was frozen (she was in short stockings, a light cotton T-shirt and a pullover tied by its sleeves round her neck), Micòl started to speak again.

‘Perotti would like to waste vast quantities of time and elbow grease on this ghastly old wreck!’ she said. ‘No, listen to what I’m saying - here where it’s so gloomy you can make a great fuss about the wonder of it, but outside, by natural light, there’s nothing to be done about it, thousands of little defects glare at you, the paintwork stripped in many places, the spokes and hubs of the wheels are all eaten away, the material of this seat (now you can’t see it but I can assure you it’s so) is worn away practically to a cobweb. And so I ask myself: what’s Perotti bursting his blood vessels for? Is it worth it? The poor creature wants to have Papa’s permission to repaint the whole thing, to restore and beaver away at it to his heart’s content. But Papa’s havering about it as usual and can’t decide.’

She fell silent; and moved very slightly.

‘Consider, in contrast, that canoe,’ she went on, at the same time pointing out to me through the carriage-door window, which our breath and begun to mist over, a greyish, oblong, skeletal shape leaning against the wall opposite the grapefruit frame. ‘Consider the canoe, and admire how honestly, with what dignity and moral courage, it’s faced up to the full consequences of its utter uselessness, as it needed to. Even things, even they have to die, my friend. And so, if even they have to die, it’s just as well to let them go. Above all, there far more style in that, wouldn't you say?’

The moment a relationship changes. Friends for ages; sexual attraction, lying unseen in the background, arrives suddenly, and, in the intimacy of this carriage, plays centre-stage; shifting the atmosphere, it forces innocence to make a shameful confession: emotions ooze out of our hero like sweat. Such a display cools Micòl’s feelings, whose mind freezes them into frost. He is losing her. The crudity of raw emotion is offensive to refined taste. Her old love, long since fading, vanishes; for nothing more likely than the expression of another’s feelings to clarify one’s own. Yet love is unstable. Was there a chance? Her distance that numbness when feeling overwhelms the mind, which suffers vertigo? A time for our hero to push her over the edge…to act, take a risk, test if she’ll resist or submit: to fall into his arms, or shatter into fury and disgust. But they are friends, when risks are dangers, and we fear losing somebody already part of our lives. Too clever to act without thought, our man must first understand a feeling; which gets in the way of the act. Too slow! And already he is reflecting on this atmospheric shift; whose meaning suffuses his soul with the melancholy of lost opportunities. A big mistake! Self-consciously in love, he becomes a bore, as actions become telegraphed, obvious, dull. Micòl turns the radio off. Never on the same wavelength again. Offended by such brutish sentimentality, this sophisticate reacts negatively; becoming evermore remote, her coolness turning the warm oven of their friendship into the freezer of estranged love. Love. Love responds to the charms of touch. He should have kissed her, not talked that “drivel”; for words too crude to navigate the subtleties of this scene. One kiss…but he insists on talking. And such talk! Cold water on flesh that wants melting heat. Seeing his emotion her mind feels only ugliness; she retreats into her intellect, a mental panopticon. It’s an odd quality of the sophisticated; so responsive to stimuli, they are intolerant and impenetrable when bruised by another’s crudities. All sentiment disappears. Yesterday’s toys today’s rubbish, thrown into the bin. And once the decision made Micòl won’t change her mind. Friends only! But a man in love cannot keep that old balance, when sex a mere extra. No! Señor Sex now wants to play the leading role. Tragic. Losing the chance of love he loses her as a friend. Never to be close again. He takes his father’s advice. He leaves the Finzi-Continis forever.  

Not just love lost. We eavesdrop an eulogy on the aristocracy. 

 

The novel is at one level an allegory of the Jewish experience in Italy: so finely assimilated but, at the crucial, climatic, moment, their distance is revealed, and they are rejected. One level down - the more interesting because given in concrete detail - is a tale of class boundaries, its watchtowers and border guards. Our narrator is a bourgeois. Micòl the daughter of wealthy aristocrats. His intelligence and manners gives him easy access to such a family - his intelligence meets theirs on terms of equality - but, ultimately, there are barriers he cannot cross, no matter how long he stays on the territory, how close he gets to Micòl, Alberto and Professor Ermanno, the father. A feeling of mind, certain attitudes, a delicacy of taste, the ease, the grace, that confidence in knowing others are listening to you; these are special qualities that only a special milieu can provision. Insulated within a world - both in sensibility and in space: that enormous garden separates them from Ferrara - they remain forever out of reach. Aloof and alone. Even when they love you it is not the same love that you feel. Time to take the lift to the lowest and richest level. Here we experience the adventure of adolescence; the freedom of young adulthood discovering new worlds; its odd and exciting people. A world of wonders!

To start with, there was an abundance of books. Those on literary subjects mixed up with the scientific (mathematics, physics, economics, agriculture, medicine, astronomy, and so on); books on local history, Ferrarese or Venetian, with those on ‘ancient Jewish history’ - the volumes chaotically crowded the usual glass-fronted bookcases, and took up a good part of the big walnut table (behind which, if he were seated, Professor Ermanno would most likely show as little more than the top of his beret); they were heaped up in perilously unsteady piles on the chairs, stacked into towers even on the floor, and scattered around almost everywhere. An enormous map of the world, then a lectern, a microscope, half a dozen barometers, a steel safe painted dark red, a small white bed like you see in doctors’ surgeries, several hourglasses of different sizes, a brass kettledrum, a little German upright piano topped by two metronomes shut in their pyramidical cases, and beyond, many other objects of uncertain use which I don’t now recall, lent the surroundings the look of a Faustian laboratory, which Professor Ermanno himself was the first to make fun of and to excuse himself for as if it represented a personal, private weakness of his: almost as if it was all that remained of his childish fads. However, I was forgetting to mention the fact that as far as pictures went, in contrast to all the other rooms of the house, which were generally overladen with them, here there were none to be seen except one: a huge life-size portrait by Lenbach, weighing the wall behind the table like an altarpiece. The magnificent blond lady bodied forth in this, standing upright, her shoulders bared, a fan in her gloved hand and with the silken train of her white gown brought to the fore to emphasise her length of leg and fullness of form, was obviously no other than the Baroness Josette Artom di Susegana. What a marmoreal forehead, what eyes, what a scornful lip, what a bust! She truly looked like a queen. His mother’s portrait was the only thing, among that host of objects in the study, which Professor Ermanno did not joke about - not that morning, not ever.

This world is an exciting place for an intelligent teenager, who needs culture as others sex and alcohol. Books. Films. Music. Poetry. Intense new experiences, that in creating a new world also describe, expound, elucidate, its meaning; his metamorphosis, the flux, the odd feelings, his elevation, his loneliness, plus the alienation, with its inevitable revolt. To read the classics and understand himself through them. Wow! It is to be a character in some famous play. He is peculiar to himself. His life a predicament. Super-conscious, and of course aware of his isolation, he seeks novel ways of ending it; thus the desire for a community; but no loose constellation of acquaintances, rather an intellectual brotherhood, a meeting of minds and bodies. Life to be mediated through the Idea. This boy swims into the conceptual ocean.… He desires some sort of religion to replace the discarded family; a substitute for those habits, customs, the simple instincts, that once protected him from the sufferings of self, the pain of thought. Only ideas to give him the solidity to secure this new persona. Such youth are idealists, dressing up fragile egos in the denim and leather of rebel and bravo. If lucky and survive, their minds to become their own universe; we think of Professor Ermanno, who fulfils the promise of the cultivated life. Our hero is still young, his mind the slave of his body and its wild emotions. No cool, distant, sophisticated consideration of concepts, is at this time possible. His mind not a seminar room. No! It is a debating chamber, where opponents throw abuse not dissect logical niceties. New ideas a punch in the face. That force new kinds of thinking, wrenching us from our childish ego, which tries to hide its pain. Mad for concepts…as desperate as love, as sex.

The clever adolescent meets lots of interesting people, who stimulate new thoughts and new dreams of destruction (new ideas, at this age, are more attractive than past ones). People: their own kind of radicalism. Once you saw everything from the ground; today you’re looking at Pisa leaning from the top of its tower…. First it’s pure discovery, as we place ourselves amongst such characters. Adapting to these new attitudes, our hero is intoxicated by the beauty and grace of the Finzi-Continis, their aristocratic ease, their sophisticated charm, that insouciance. He is in love with a whole way of living. For a while he feels their equal; for how quickly he appears to fit in. Close friendships. Intellectual arguments. The richness of this place, overwhelming the senses. In the morning he settles down in the family’s library to write his thesis. It’s own civilisation. For dinner he dines with the family. ‘I belong here.…’ Only later, when an intimate, does he discover the unbridgeable distances; finds he’s an outsider, a barbarian. They have a magic he lacks. A secret life force forever out of his reach. Always to be a stranger. There’s a reaction. He begins to resent this ‘foreign country’.

So, taking our cue from Alberto and his presumed illness, we had unwittingly introduced into our night-time conversations the new theme, hitherto taboo, of the Finzi-Continis. Both of us were well aware we were walking over a minefield, and for this reason we always proceeded with great caution, very careful not to put a foot wrong. But it’s worth saying that every time we spoke of them as a family, as an ‘institution’ - I’m not sure who first came up with this word but I remember that it gave us some satisfaction and made us laugh - Malnate made free with his criticisms, even the harshest. What impossible people they were! - he’d say. What a strange, absurd tangle of incurable contradictions they represented, ‘socially’! At times, thinking about the thousands of hectares of land they possessed, and the thousands of labourers who worked it for them, the disciplined, submissive slaves of the Corporative Regime, at times he was tempted to prefer the grim ‘regular landlords, those who, in 1920, 1921 and 1922 had hardly paused a moment to fork out for the blackshirt squads with their strong-arm and castor-oil tactics. They ‘at least’ were Fascists. When the occasion presented itself, there wouldn’t be any lingering doubts about how to treat them. But the Finzi-Continis?

And he would shake his head, with the expression of someone who, should they wish to, could even understand such subtleties and complications, but who is just not minded to. Such tiny fine discriminations, intriguing and engaging as they might be, at a certain point became irrelevant: they too would be swept away.

The hero reasserts his personality. After months quarrying new experiences - what mineral wealth! - and discarding his own history as so much rubble, he now returns to his own past. Digging up its valuable rocks, he judges them against the Finzi-Continis. More realism? Less! For how use these ordinary types to measure such extra-ordinary characters? Then that dream of assimilation. Still hopelessly in love, though trying to deny it, our hero tries to hang onto this world slipping out of his fingers. It should have been a permanent abode. It never could be. This estate but an extended holiday.

Our poor sap returns home late one night. An insomniac father calls him into his room. There is a long conversation, and the old man recommends a complete break with the Finzi-Continis, for marriage to Micòl is impossible.

‘And forgive me,’ he continued, ‘but even as a family the Finzi-Continis were not suitable… they weren’t people cut out for us… Marrying a girl of that kind, I’m sure that sooner or later you’d have found yourself in trouble… but yes, yes, it’s the truth,’ he insisted, perhaps fearing some word of gesture of mine in protest. ‘You well know what my opinion has always been on that subject. They’s different from us… they don’t even seem to be Judim… Eh, I know: she Micòl, perhaps for this reason was especially attractive to you… because she was superior to us… socially. But mark my words: it’s better it’s ended this way. The proverb says: “Choose oxen and women from your own country.” And that girl, regardless of appearances, was certainly not from your own country. Not in the least.’

The lad in receptive mood, he calmly listens to wise advice. At last to see the world of the Finzi-Continis with clear eyes: they are different from me, and must remain so. Such insight is the end of his education. Adolescence over; the great ritual of maturity has been accomplished. Breaking his dependence upon the family, he has survived with only a few scars, those of his first love affair. A sojourn in paradise ends, as it must, for this young adult is becoming a man. The Garden of Eden exists, it is the estate of the Finzi-Continis: myth slides into reality into metaphor…it is those years, roughly between the ages of 17 and 25, when, have broken free of childhood, we live the free life in new surroundings. What spiritual riches! Which can be immense for the clever, who find doors into secret gardens, take the elevator to some penthouse suite, its roof-top tropicalia. The discoveries, the revelations, the transformations. They overwhelm us in their profusion, their profundity. It cannot last. We must grow, change; the fluidity of youth settling down into a concrete maturity; where differences are easier to see, harder to reconcile. Then one day we eat from the tree of knowledge: this is not our garden. We cannot stay here. The bell rings. It is time to go. A servant opens the gates…. Goodbye. Goodbye. Tears trickling down our cheeks.

Review: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis