Memory and Lost Time

Giorgio Bassani, who died in 2000, famously brought one Italian masterpiece to light and created another. As an editor he was instrumental in rescuing from oblivion Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard,* which had been rejected by many other publishers as old-fashioned and politically incorrect. Bassani’s own contribution, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, has the quiet intensity of a Vermeer, intimately evoking his home city of Ferrara and the small Jewish community within it during the critical months after Mussolini introduced the racial laws to placate Hitler in 1938.

Despite its particularity this beautiful, haunting novel has a resonance far beyond those city walls and the darkening months before the war. Bassani’s account of the joys and tormenting uncertainties of first love is as universal as the themes threading through it: the unknowability of other people, the connecting layers of history, the weight of memory and lost time. I remembered, wrongly, that the narrative begins and ends with a bicycle ride (Ferrara has the highest per capita use of cycles anywhere in Europe except Copenhagen). In fact the story is framed by the (unnamed) narrator’s visit, years later, to an Etruscan burial place, which reminds him of the Finzi-Continis’ rather ugly marble tomb in the Jewish cemetery in Ferrara, and thence of their shared past. If this is beginning to sound relentlessly gloomy, it isn’t, despite the undeniably elegiac tone. The scene that I remembered, the first real encounter between the 13-year-old schoolboy dawdling with his bike on the way home after failing his maths exam, and Micòl Finzi-Contini, consoling him over the wall of her family estate, is in fact the first act in the narrative proper. It is also another prelude to the main events ten years later; but then the whole book is an extended prelude, not so much to a culmination as to a vanishing point, which we have already been warned about at the beginning. In 1938, after years out of contact, Micòl’s brother Alberto invites the narrator, now a young man, and ‘the others’ no longer welcome at the tennis club, to play on the tennis court in the Finzi-Contini estate. This is Italy, not Germany: the narrator’s father and his progressive-minded Jewish friends are all signed-up members of the Fascist Party, and the tennis-club players are less frightened than outraged at being interrupted mid-match. Micòl and Alberto charm their guests with self-deprecatory chat and the tennis party turns into a daily routine of games played through late afternoons into milky dusk, refreshed by tea served by the chauffeur on a silver tray. As Micòl leads the young man off to explore the estate, love creeps up so stealthily that he doesn’t recognize it until after the idyll is broken by autumn weather and her disappearance to college in Venice. Bereft, he befriends her brother instead, and Alberto’s Communist friend Malnate, a big bespectacled man of the people working in a factory as a chemist. Gradually the relationships shift, with subtle undercurrents of emotion, always implicit, through evenings of argument, against the sinister encroachment of darker events. Humiliatingly ejected from the municipal library, the young man is invited by Professor Ermanno, Alberto and Micòl’s father, to work instead in the Finzi-Contini library, which has all the sources he needs for his dissertation. He is in love with the family, their antique aristocratic manners, the sprawling estate, the overheated house, the ancient lift and the horse-drawn carriage where he should have kissed Micòl. He compares his own family’s bewildered, ‘pointless dirge’ against the horrible new legal affronts inflicted on them with the Finzi-Continis’ reaction of elegant sarcasm. This is a masculine novel, in which Micòl represents the classic object of unobtainable desire. But her charm and originality emerge vividly in her teasing and quaintly phrased conversation, whimsical notions and good-natured complaints. She sees things more clearly than the clever, painfully immature narrator; they are friends, she says, not combatants in the ‘cruel, ferocious game’ of love. Obsessed as he is, it never occurs to him that she is also socially beyond his reach. Finally his father rescues him from the bitterness of Micòl’s daily rejection: ‘Wife and oxen from your own village,’ he advises pithily. For once the young man listens to him. When he looks back later, so much is left unanswered. What was there between Micòl and Malnate? Or indeed between Alberto and Malnate? All he knows is that after the war he is the only survivor, except possibly for Micòl, whom he never meets again. She had told him that they were too alike to be lovers, and in his heart he knows she was right: ‘for me, no less than for her, the memory of things was much more important than the possession of them . . . It was our vice, this: looking backwards as we went ahead.’ Bassani’s novel is an atmospheric companion in Ferrara: the city walls wide enough to ride along the top, the Renaissance streets and palaces, the library, even the ghetto are all as he described them. The graveyards, too, and the flat humid countryside. And bicycles everywhere, often ancient boneshakers, steered by businessmen, whole families carried pillion, dog walkers and stout matrons out shopping. One morning there, poised to finish the book, I bought focàccia and ham for a picnic and pedalled my rented bike up the via Ercole d’Este. Past the dislocating perspectives of the Palace of Diamonds, I turned and followed a woman cyclist down a side road towards, I hoped, a park. No, she said, it was a cemetery; but I was welcome to her ‘private park’, her garden, to pick cherries from a fallen tree. Gratefully accepting a handful, I followed the city wall until a track led down to some trees, in whose shade I ate my picnic and the glossy fruit. Birds sang as I followed the Finzi-Continis to their fate. After a bit I cycled on, to complete the afternoon gazing at the exquisite secular frescoes in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Schifanoia (meaning roughly ‘Away with Boredom’). That day, though I didn’t quite grasp it then, I glimpsed in Bassani’s understated elegy the measure of his achievement. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis helped to repair the tradition of arts and letters that the princes of Este had fostered centuries earlier (for their own glory, admittedly) in Ferrara; and so to reconcile Bassani’s city, so blackened by its wartime history, with its past.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 12 © Anne Boston 2006

* See Issue 11 of Slightly Foxed.