The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, Page 4

  Put to flight on this matter, Fadigati would then try his luck with politics. The Spanish Civil War was by now about to end with victory for Franco and Fascism. One morning, having scanned the first page of the Corriere della Sera, evidently confident he would not be saying anything that might give offence to Nino or to any of us, absolutely sure, on the contrary, to find us all in agreement, Fadigati expressed what was then not in the least an outlandish view, that the triumph of ‘our legionaries’ should be considered a great cause of celebration. And instead, all of a sudden, the most unexpected scene erupted. As though galvanized by an electric current, and raising his voice so much that Bianca, at a certain point, thought it best to put her hand over his mouth, Nino began to bawl that ‘perhaps’ it was a disaster, the opposite of a triumph, that ‘perhaps it was the beginning of the end’ and that he, the doctor, should be ashamed at his age to be so ‘irresponsible’.

  ‘I’m sorry, my dear boy … you see … if I may say …’ Fadigati kept repeating, white as a sheet. Utterly lost beneath the raging of this storm, he just could not understand. His eyes skittered round as if in search of an explanation. But even we were too disconcerted to pay attention to him – especially me, who, the year before, in the course of our usual arguments had been accused by Nino himself – a follower of Gentile, and a passionate advocate for the ethical State – of being infected by ‘Crocean scepticism’3 … And, by the end of it all, the doctor’s round eyes were directed at the floor, shining damply beneath his lenses, or were they filled with a bitter satisfaction, with a childish, inexplicable, blind joy?

  On another occasion we were all talking about sport.

  If in questions of culture, Nino Bottecchiari was considered our resident expert, Deliliers indisputably held sway on all questions of sport. Ferrarese only on his mother’s side – born in Imperia, I believe, or Ventimiglia, his father had been killed in 1918 on the Grappa, at the head of an Arditi company – like Vittorio Molon, he too had only studied at Ferrara for the upper-middle school, that is, for the four years at the liceo scientifico. For whatever else they had served, those four years had been enough to elevate Eraldo into a princely local hero. In 1935 he had won the regional schoolboys’ boxing championships, middle weight, and apart from that he was an extraordinarily handsome boy, six foot tall, and with a face and body like a Greek statue. Already, at not yet twenty years of age, he had won three or four famous victories. A girl, who was a friend of his at school, had killed herself for love of him the same year he had won the title in the Emilian Championships. All of a sudden he had stopped even looking at her, and then she, the poor girl, ran and threw herself into the Po. It was clear that, also in university circles, Eraldo Deliliers was more than loved – he was idolized. When we dressed we modelled ourselves on his clothes, which his mother brushed, took the stains out of, and tirelessly ironed. To stand next to him on Sunday mornings, at the Caffè della Borsa, leaning against a column at the entrance and looking at the legs of women that passed, was considered a special privilege.

  So, on one of those train journeys, towards the end of March, we were discussing sport with Deliliers. After athletics we ended up talking about boxing. He always kept his distance from everyone, Deliliers. But that day he was unusually open. He said that studying didn’t suit him, that he needed too much money ‘to live’, and so, if he succeeded in a certain little coup that he was planning, he hoped to devote himself entirely to the ‘noble art’.

  ‘What, as a professional?’ Fadigati had dared to ask.

  Deliliers looked at him as if he were a cockroach.

  ‘Naturally,’ he replied. ‘Are you worried I’ll ruin my face, Doctor?’

  ‘Your face doesn’t concern me, although I can see it’s already quite marked with scars around the eyebrows. I feel duty-bound to warn you, though, that boxing, especially in the professional realm, in the long term ends up being deleterious to the organism. If I were in the Government, I’d have pugilism banned: even amateur fighting. Rather than a sport, I consider it a species of legal assassination. Pure organized brutality –’

  ‘Oh, do me a favour!’ Deliliers interrupted him. ‘Have you ever watched a fight?’

  Fadigati was forced to confess he hadn’t. He said that, as a doctor, violence and blood horrified him.

  ‘Well then, if you’ve never seen a fight,’ Deliliers cut him short, ‘why are you talking about it? Who asked for your opinion?’

  And once again, while Deliliers, almost shouting, threw these words at the doctor, and then, turning his back on him, explained to us in a much calmer voice, that boxing, ‘the opposite of what certain idiots may think’, in essence is a sport of the legs, of timing and fencing, above all of fencing, once again I saw shining in Fadigati’s eyes the absurd but unmistakeable light of an interior joy.

  Nino Bottecchiari was the only one among us who did not revere Deliliers. They weren’t friends, but they respected each other. In front of Nino, Deliliers considerably diluted his usual wide-boy antics, just as Nino, on his side, acted far less the professor.

  One morning Nino and Bianca weren’t there – it was in June, if I remember right, during the exams. There were only six of us in the compartment, all men.

  I had a bit of a sore throat, and was complaining of it. Recollecting that as a boy, while I was growing fast, he had had to treat me on various occasions for inflamed tonsils, Fadigati immediately offered to give me a ‘look-over’.

  ‘Let’s see.’

  He raised his glasses on to his forehead, took my head in his hands and began to examine my throat.

  ‘Say aah!’ he ordered, in his professional tone.

  I complied. And he was still there examining my throat, and at the same time recommending in a friendly, paternal manner that I should take care not to get overheated and sweat, since my tonsils ‘although by now quite reduced in size’ clearly remained my … ‘Achilles heel’, when Deliliers suddenly came out with:

  ‘Excuse me, Doctor. When you’ve finished, I wonder if you’d give a little look at mine?’

  Fadigati turned round: evidently much surprised by the request, and the gentle tone with which Deliliers had phrased it.

  ‘What do you feel?’ he asked. ‘Does it hurt to swallow?’

  Dililiers stared at him with his blue eyes. He smiled, showing a glint of his incisors.

  ‘It’s not my throat that’s bothering me at all,’ he said.

  ‘Well, what is it then?’

  ‘Here,’ said Deliliers, pointing at his own trousers at groin level.

  He explained in a calm, indifferent manner, but not without a trace of pride, that he’d been suffering for about a month from the effects of a ‘gift from the little virgins of Via Bomporto’ – ‘it’s no joke, I can tell you’ – because of which he had had to give up work in the gym ‘as well’. Dr Manfredini, he added, was treating it with blue meths and daily poultices of permanganate. But the treatment was taking too long, and he had to get fit as quickly as possible.

  ‘My womenfolk are beginning to complain, as you can imagine … And so, would you mind taking a look at it as well?’

  Fadigati had gone back to his seat.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he stammered, ‘you know very well that with this kind of illness I have absolutely no expertise. And besides, Dr Manfredini –’

  ‘Don’t tell me that – you understand such things only too well!’ grinned Deliliers.

  ‘Not to mention that here on a train …’ continued Fadigati, giving a frightened glance towards the corridor, ‘here on the train … how could it be done … ?’

  ‘Oh, as for that,’ replied Deliliers, ready for him, curling his lip in disdain, ‘there’s always the toilet, if you’d prefer.’

  There was a moment of silence.

  It was Fadigati who first broke into a loud laugh.

  ‘You’re joking!’ he cried out. ‘Do you never stop joking? You
must take me for an idiot.’

  This, leaning forwards and slapping his knee.

  ‘You ought to take care,’ he said. ‘If not, one day or another you’ll come to a bad end!’

  And Deliliers, in return, but with a serious tone:

  ‘It’s you who should be worried about that.’

  Some days afterwards, at around six in the evening, we were all at Majano’s in Via Independenza. It was very hot. Nino was the one who first suggested going for an ice cream. If we didn’t buy them – he said – we’d soon, no, ‘immediately’ have reason enough to regret it.

  Even then, before the modernization of 1940, the Pasticceria Majano was one of the biggest pastry shops in Bologna. It consisted of an enormous, dimly lit hall, from whose high and shadowy ceiling hung a solitary, gigantic chandelier of Murano glass. Two or three metres in diameter, it represented a rose. It was crowded with a vast quantity of little dusty light bulbs from which an extraordinarily dingy light rained down.

  No sooner had we entered than our eyes sought out at the end of the hall the source of the loud laughter we heard.

  There must have been twenty or so boys there, most of them in navy-blue tracksuits: some sprawled in seats, some standing around, and each of them gripping an ice cream either in a cup or a cone. Meanwhile they were talking loudly, in the most varying of accents: Bolognese, Romagnolo, Veneto, Marchigiano, Tuscan. At a glance, you could tell they belonged to that particular category of university students far more enamoured of sports stadia and swimming pools than of lecture halls and libraries.

  Except for Deliliers, who immediately greeted us from the distance by raising his right arm in a friendly wave. To begin with we couldn’t make out among the company anyone else that we recognized, but after a few moments, when we’d grown used to the dim light, we discerned, half hidden within the group, an older gentleman sitting next to Deliliers with his back turned to the entrance. He was there, wearing his hat, his hands linked over the handle of his cane, without eating anything. He was just waiting. Like a tender-hearted father who had agreed to pay for ice creams for a noisy herd of sons and nephews, and who waits in silence, a little ashamed of himself, until the darling kids have finished licking and sucking to their hearts’ content, to ferry them all home …

  That gentleman was obviously Fadigati.

  8

  That summer too, we went on our holidays to Riccione on the nearby Adriatic coast. Every year the same thing happened. My father, having vainly tried to entice us up into the mountains, the Dolomites, to see the places where he had fought in the war, in the end resigned himself to another trip to Riccione, renting the same little villa next to the Grand Hôtel. I remember it all perfectly. My mother, Fanny, our younger sister and I left Ferrara on the 10th of August, accompanied by our maid – Ernesto, my brother, had been in England since mid-July staying with a family in Bath to improve his English. As for my father, who had stayed in town, he was going to join us later: as soon as his duties administering the land at Masi Torello allowed him to leave.

  The same day we arrived we immediately heard about Fadigati and Deliliers. On the beach, even then crowded with Ferraresi on their family holidays, they spoke of nothing else but them and their ‘scandalous friendship’.

  Starting from the first days of August, in fact, the two had been seen moving from one hotel to another in the various seaside towns between Porto Corsini and the Punta di Pesaro. They had appeared first of all in the Milano Marittima, beyond the dockland canal of Cervia, having rented a lovely room in the Hôtel Mare e Pineta. After a week, they had moved to Cesenatico, to the Hôtel Britannia. And then, inspiring fierce indignation and endless rumours everywhere, they gradually progressed to Viserba, Rimini, Riccione itself and Cattolica. They travelled by car: a red two-seater Alfa Romeo 1750 of the Mille Miglia type.

  Around the 20th of August, apparently without a care in the world, there they were once more in Riccione, set up in the Grand Hôtel as they had been some ten days earlier.

  The Alfa Romeo was brand new. Its engine gave a kind of growl. As well as for travelling, the two friends also employed it for the passeggiata every evening, when, at sunset, the crowd of bathers returned from the strip of sand to saunter along the promenade. Deliliers always drove. Blond, tanned, beautiful in his tight-fitting T-shirts and cream-coloured woollen trousers (his hands, negligently draped over the steering wheel, were adorned with fretted, shammy-leather gloves about whose cost no one could harbour any doubts) – clearly it was only to him, to his exclusive whims, that the car responded. The other did nothing.

  Wearing passenger goggles (an object he was never separated from, not even when the automobile, cutting through the crowd with some difficulty, had to idle along a stretch of the avenue outside Caffè Zanarini at a walking pace), he would let himself be chauffeured up and down, seated complacently next to his companion.

  They continued to sleep in the same room, to eat at the same table.

  And they sat at the same little table even in the evenings, when the Grand Hôtel’s orchestra, having had their instruments transported from the ground-floor dining hall to the terrace exposed to the sea breeze, moved on from strains of light music to modern and jazz numbers. Soon the terrace would fill up – often enough I even went there myself with friends I had met on the beach – and Deliliers would never miss a single tango, waltz, two-step, nor a ‘slow’ dance. Of course, Fadigati never danced. Every now and then taking to his lips the straw tilted above the rim of the glass, with his round eyes he never stopped following the suave moves that his distant friend accomplished, his arms always embracing the most elegant, the most conspicuous girls and women. Returning from their drives, both of them would immediately go up to their room to don their smoking jackets. Sober, heavy black material, Fadigati’s; Deliliers’s a white jacket, close fitting and cut short at the sides.

  Life at the beach they also shared together: except that in the morning it was usually Fadigati who left the hotel first.

  He would arrive when there was almost nobody else around, between eight thirty and nine o’clock, respectfully greeted by the bathing attendants, to whom, by their own account, he was always very generous with tips. Dressed from head to toe in normal city clothes (only later, when the heat increased, would he decide to shed his tie and shoes, but never his white panama hat, with its brim lowered over his eyes – that he kept on), he would go to sit under the solitary beach umbrella which he had asked to be planted further forwards than all the rest, just a few yards from the shore. Stretched out on a reclining deckchair, his hands linked behind his neck and a detective story open on his knee, he would remain like that for a good two hours, staring at the sea.

  Deliliers never joined him before eleven o’clock. With his svelte stride of a lazy animal, made still more elegant by the slight impediment of clogs, there he would be, crossing without hurry the clearing of burning sand between the beach huts and the bathing tents. He, by contrast, would be almost naked. The white bathing trunks which he was just at that moment finishing lacing up on his left hip and the same gold chain which he always wore round his neck, and from which dangled a pendant of the Madonna at the top of his chest, somehow only served to accentuate his nakedness. And though, especially the first few days, it seemed to cost him some effort to greet even me when he saw me there in the shade of our tent; and though passing through the narrow passage between the tents and the umbrellas he never failed to furrow his brow in a show of annoyance, there was no real reason to take this performance seriously. It was clear he felt himself admired by most of those present, by the men as well as the women, and this was a source of considerable pleasure to him.

  Without doubt everyone admired him, men and women alike. But it fell to Fadigati to pay for the indulgence that the Ferrarese sector of the beach at Riccione reserved for Deliliers.

  Our beach-tent neighbour that year was Signora Lavezzoli, the wife of the lawyer. Havi
ng lost her former status, she is now just an old woman. But then, in the ripe splendour of her forty years, surrounded by the unstinting deference of her three adolescent children, two boys and a girl, and that, equally unstinting, of her worthy consort, the illustrious civil lawyer, university professor and ex-deputy in the Salandra camp,1 she was considered one of the principal and most authoritative fonts of the city’s public opinion.

  Pointing her lorgnette towards the beach umbrella under which Deliliers had come to rest, Signora Lavezzoli, who had been born and raised in Pisa, ‘on the banks of the Arno’, and made use of the exceptional skill of her quick Tuscan tongue, kept us continually abreast of everything that was happening ‘over there’.

  With the technique, almost, of a radio sports commentator, she would note for example that ‘the newly-weds’, having just got up from their deckchairs, were wending their way towards the nearest pleasure-boat: clearly the young man had expressed the desire to dive into the open sea, and ‘Signor Dottore’, so as not to remain on his own, ‘in the throes of anxious passion’, awaiting his return, had received permission to accompany him. Or else she described and commented on the freestyle gymnastic exercises that Deliliers, after his swim, would execute on his own, to dry himself, while ‘the beloved’, immobile there beside him with a towel in hand, would only too willingly have offered to do the drying himself, the rubbing down, the touching …

  Oh, that Deliliers – she would then add, always speaking from tent to tent, but directing her speech to my mother in particular – perhaps believing that she was lowering her voice in such a way that the ‘children’ would not be able to hear her, though actually speaking louder than ever – that Deliliers was just a spoilt boy, a ‘young good-for-nothing’ for whom military service might prove more than useful. But not Dr Fadigati. For a gentleman of his standing, of his age, there was really no excuse. He was ‘that way’? So what – live with it! Who’d been that bothered about it anyway, until now? But to put on such an exhibition, especially here at Riccione, where he could not pretend he wasn’t known, to make such a spectacle of himself; especially here when, had it been his desire, Italy could have furnished him with thousands of beaches where there’d be no danger of bumping into someone from Ferrara. Not a bit of it. Only from ‘a dirty old man’ (and so saying, Signora Lavezzoli shot forth flames of real indignation from her queenly blue eyes), only from an ‘old degenerate’ like him could one expect behaviour of this sort.