The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani Page A

so): suddenly, towards the end of the match, the entire “old guard” appeared along the path of climbing roses, one behind the other. They made quite a procession. At the head of it, professor Ermanno and his wife. There followed, shortly afterwards, the Herrera uncles from Venice: one, with a cigarette between his thick protuberant lips, hands clasped behind his back, looking around with the faintly embarrassed air of a townsman landed reluctantly in the country; the other a few yards behind him, with signora Regina on his arm, regulating his pace to his mother’s very slow one. If the T.B. specialist and the engineer were in Ferrara-I said to myself-they must be here for some religious celebration. But which? After Roshashana, which fell in October, I couldn’t remember any other feasts in the autumn. Could it be Succoth? Very likely. Unless Federico, the engineer, had equally probably been expelled from the State Railways, which suggested a special family council had been called. . . .
    They sat down tidily, making hardly any noise. The only exception was signora Regina. As she was being settled into a deck-chair, she said two or three words in the family slang in her loud, deaf-woman’s voice; complaining, I think, of the garden’s dampness  (“mucha umidita ”) at that hour. But her son Federico, the railway engineer, was still beside her, looking after her, and, no less loudly (but his tone was neutral: the tone of voice my father also used occasionally, in mixed company, when he wanted to communicate with a member of the family, and no one else), quickly quietened her, telling her to be callada, quiet. Couldn’t she see the musafir?
    I leant down to Micol’s ear.
    “Instead of saying ‘be callada’, we say ‘be sciadok' But what does musafir mean?”
    “Guest,” she whispered back to me. “Goi, though.” And she laughed, childishly covering her mouth with one hand and winking: Micol-1929-style.
    Later, at the end of the match, and after the “new arrivals”, Desiree Baggioli and Claudio Montemezzo had been introduced in their turn, I happened to find myself a little apart with professor Ermanno. In the park, the day was as usual snuffing out in diffused, milky shadows. I had moved away about ten steps.
    Behind me I heard Micol’s sharp voice dominating the others. Heaven knows who she was grumbling at now, and why.
    I looked towards the Wall of the Angels, still lit by the sun.
    “Era gia l'ora che volge il disto,”* * “Now in the hour that melts with homesick yearning”: Dante,  Purgatory  (translated by D. Sayers) a soft ironical voice declaimed beside me.
    I turned, surprised. It was professor Ermanno, smiling good-naturedly at me, pleased to have made me start. He took me delicately by the arm, and then very slowly, pausing occasionally, we took a turn right round the tennis court, making a very wide circle well away from the wire-netting around it. In the end, though, so as not to risk ending up where we started, among the friends and relations, we turned back. Backwards and forwards: we repeated the manceuvre several times, in the gathering darkness. Meantime we talked: or rather he talked most of the time, professor Ermanno.
    He began asking me what I thought of the tennis court, whether it really seemed to me so frightful. Micol had quite made up her mind: she said it needed remaking completely, up to modern standards. But he doubted it: maybe his “darling earthquake” was exaggerating, as usual, maybe they wouldn’t have to make a clean sweep of the whole thing, the way she wanted to.
    “Whichever way it is,” he went on, “it’ll start raining in a few days, there’s no point in deluding ourselves. We’d better put off everything until next year, don’ t you agree ? ”
    Then he went on to ask me what I was doing, what
    I meant to do in the immediate future. And how my parents were.
    While he asked me about “Papa”, I