The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani Read Free Book Online Page A

let you in?” she said. “If you like, I’ll show you what to do right away.”

Chapter Six

    How many years have gone by since that remote June afternoon? Over thirty. And yet, if I shut my eyes, Micol Finzi-Contini is still there, looking over the garden wall, watching me, talking to me. She was little more than a child in 1929, a thin fair thirteen-year-old with large light magnetic eyes, and I a stuck-up, dandified, extremely middle-class brat in short trousers, whom the first whiff of trouble at school was enough to throw into the most childish despair. We stared at each other. Above her the sky was blue, all of a piece, a warm, already summer sky without a trace of cloud. Nothing could change it, and nothing has, in fact, changed it, at least m my memory.
    “Well, d’you want to or don’t you?” said Micol.
    “I ... I’m not sure ...” I started to say, pointing to the wall. “It seems terribly high to me.”
    “Because you haven’t seen it properly,” she retorted impatiently. “Look there, and there, and there,” and she pointed to make me see. “There are masses of notches, and even a nail up here, at the top. I stuck it in myself.”
    “Yes, there are footholds all right,” I murmured uncertainly, “but . . .”
    “Footholds!” she broke in at once, and burst out laughing, “I call them notches.”
    “Well, you’re wrong, because they’re called footholds,” I said, acid and obstinate. “Anyone can see you’ve never been up a mountain.”
    I have always suffered from dizziness, since I was a child, and, although there was nothing to it, the climb bothered me. When I was a child and my mother, carrying Ernesto (Fanny was not yet born), took me on to the Montagnone, and sat down on the big grassy space opposite via Scandiana, from the top of which you could make out the roof of our house, only just distinguishable in the sea of roofs around the great hulk of the church of Santa Maria in Vado, I was, I remember, always very scared when I escaped my mother’s vigilance and went over to the parapet that surrounded the field on the side of the open country, peering over into a gulf ninety feet deep. Someone was nearly always going up or down those sheer, dizzying walls: young labourers, peasants, bricklayers, each with a bike across his shoulders; and old men too, whiskery fishermen after frogs and catfish, loaded with rods and baskets: all of them from Quacchio, Ponte della Gradella, Coccomaro, Coccomarino, and Focomorto, and all in a hurry, so that instead of going through Porta San Giorgio or Porta San Giovanni (because in those days the bastions were still all of a piece on that side, with nowhere you could get through for at least five kilometres), they took instead what they called the Wall road. If they came out of town, having crossed the field, they passed quite near me without looking my way, then climbed over the parapet and dropped over on the other side till the tips of their toes found a foothold in the decrepit wall, and so got down to the field below in a few minutes. If they came in from the country, their eyes, stretched wide open, seemed to be staring into mine, as I peeped timidly over the edge of the parapet; but of course I was wrong to think so, since all they were interested in was finding the best foothold. In any case, while they were hanging over the abyss like that-usually in pairs, one behind the other-I would hear them chatting peacefully away in dialect, just as if they were walking along a path through the fields. How calm and strong and brave they were !-I said to myself. After they had climbed right up, till they were quite near my face, so near that often, apart from being mirrored in their eyes, I was submerged in their stinking wine-laden breath, they grabbed the inner rim of the parapet with their thick calloused fingers, and, emerging straight out of space-oops !-there they were, safe and sound.