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

noticed two things: first ofall, that he found it hard to use the “tu” in addressing me, in fact, shortly afterwards he stopped suddenly and told me so explicitly, and immediately I asked him, very warmly and sincerely, to do so please, and told him he simply mustn’t call me “lei” or I’d be hurt. Secondly: that the interest and respect in his voice and face as I told him about my father’s health (in his eyes, chiefly: the glasses of his spectacles, enlarging them, accentuated the seriousness and mildness of their expression), was not at all forced, not in the least hypocritical. He urged me to remember him to my father. And to congratulate him, too: on the many trees planted in our cemetery, since the community had entrusted him with the task of seeing to it. In fact: would pines be any use? Cedars of Lebanon? Firs? Weeping willows? I was to ask my father. If by any chance they were of use (and in this day and age, with the methods of modern agriculture, transplanting even large-trunked trees was no trouble at all), he’d be very happy to put whatever number we wanted at our disposal. Why, it was a marvellous idea! Filled with large beautiful plants, our cemetery in time would rival the one of San Niccolo del Lido, in Venice.
    “Don’t you know it?”
    I said I didn’t.
    “Oh, but you must, you really must try and visit it as soon as possible!” he said, with great liveliness. “It’s a national monument! Besides, you who are a literary man will obviously remember how Giovaimi Prati’s  Edmenegarda begins.’’
    Once more I was forced to admit my ignorance.
    “Well,” he went on, “Prati starts his Edmenegarda right there, in the Jewish cemetery of the Lido, which in the nineteenth century was considered one of the most romantic spots in Italy. Mind, though: if and when you go there don’t forget to tell the caretaker-he’s the one who’s got the keys of the gate-that you mean to visit the old cemetery, mind you say the old cemetery, where no one’s been buried since the eighteenth century, and not the other one, the modern one, which is beside it but separate. I discovered it in 1905, just think. Although I was twice your age, I was still a bachelor. I was living in Venice (I’d been settled there for two years) and the time I didn’t spend at the Record Office, at campo dei Frari, rummaging through the manuscripts concerned with the various so-called nations the Jewish community in Venice was divided into in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the Levantine nation, the western, the German, the Italian -1 spent there: sometimes even in winter. The fact is I hardly ever went there alone” -here he smiled-“and in a way, deciphering the stones in the cemetery one by one, many of which go back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and are written in Spanish and Portuguese, I was carrying on my archives work out of doors. Oh, those were exquisite afternoons . . . such peace, such serenity . . . with the little gate, facing the lagoon, which opened only for us. We actually became engaged there, Olga and I.”
    He was silent for a while. I took advantage of it to ask him what was the exact object of his researches in the Record Office.
    “At first I started off with the idea of writing a history of the Jews in Venice,” he answered. “A subject suggested to me by Olga herself, which Roth, the (Jewish) Englishman Cecil Roth, dealt with so brilliantly ten years later. Then as so often happens to historians who are too much . . . enamoured of their work, some seventeenth-century documents that happened to fall into my hands absorbed my interest completely, and ended up by carrying me away from the idea. I’ll tell you about it, I’ll tell you about it if you come back . . . it’s really like a novel, in every way . . . In any case, instead of a fat historical volume, in two years all I managed to put together-apart from a wife, of