Free The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

worthy of appearing in their own personal synagogue (authentic sephardic vestments, for goodness sake, and not Portuguese or Catalan or Provens:al, but Spanish-and the right size!) they pushed off by car, followed by a big lorry, no less, as far as Cherasco, in the province of Cuneo, a village where a now extinctJewish community had lived until 1910, or thereabouts, and where only the cemetery still functioned because a few families from Turin, who’d sprung from the place, Debenedettis, Momilianos, Terracinis, still kept on burying their dead there. And Josette Artom, now, Alberto and Micol’s grandmother, in her day had kept bringing in palms and eucalyptus trees from the botanical garden in Rome, the one at the foot of the Gianicolo: and so-just so that the carts could get through easily, but for plain swank as well, quite obviously-she'd made her husband, poor Menotti, widen the way in through the garden wall of Barchetto del Duca, so that the gate was at least twice as big as any other in Corso Ercole I d’Este. Well, what happens is that if you’re crazy about collecting-things, plants, everything-you end up wanting to collect people as well. And if the Finis-Continis sighed for the ghetto (clearly that’s where they’d like to see everyone shut in: and quite prepared, in view of this fine ideal, to carve Barchetto del Duca into a kind of  kibbuz,  under their own exalted patronage) : well, they were perfectly free to do so, let them go ahead. But just in case they did, he’d always preferred Palestine. Or, even better, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, or Madagascar. . . .
     * Plural of lialto, “bigots”.

    It was Tuesday. I could not say why a few days later, on the Saturday of that same week, I made up my mind to do exactly the opposite of what my father wanted. It was not, I think, the usual quite mechanical opposition that makes children disobey their parents: perhaps all that made me suddenly take out my racket and tennis clothes, which had been lying in a drawer for over a year, was the bright day, and the delicate caressing air ofan unusually sunny afternoon in early autumn.
    In any case, several things had happened in the meantime.
    First of all, two days after Alberto’s telephone call I think it was, which makes it the Thursday, the letter “accepting” my resignation from the Eleonora dEste  tennis club in fact arrived. Typewritten, but long-windedly signed at the bottom by N.H.* marchese Ippolito Barbicinti, the registered letter, sent express, indulged in nothing personal or particular. Its few dry lines, clumsily echoing the bureaucratic style, went straight to the point: simply mentioned the Federal Secretary’s “definite orders”, and went on to say that the future presence of my “distinguished self” was “in-admisible” (sic) at the tennis club. (Could marchese * Abbreviation of Nobil Huomo, a title of nobility.
    Barbicinti ever refrain from seasoning his prose with spelling mistakes? Obviously not. But noticing them and laughing at them was a bit harder this time than it had been.)
    Secondly, the following day I think, Friday, I had another telephone call from the magna doinus ; and not from Alberto, this time, but from MicOl.
    It resulted in a long, in fact enormously long conversation: the tone of which Micol especially kept up as that of an ordinary, ironical, rambling chat between two seasoned university students between whom, as children, there might have beenjust a pinch of tenderness, but who now, after something like ten years, want nothing but a sober homecoming.
    “How long since we met?”
    “Five years or more.”
    “And what are you like, these days?”
    “Ugly. A red-nosed old maid. And what about you? Which reminds me: d’you know that I read . . .”
    “Read what?”
    “In the papers. That you were in that Art and Culture racket at Venice a couple of years ago. Flying the flag, weren’t you? Pretty good ! But of