Giorgio Bassani

It was in 1919, just after the other war. Because of my age, I who write this can only offer a rather vague and confused picture of that period. The town-centre caffès spilt over with officers in uniform; lorries bedecked with flags continually passed by along Corso Giovecca and Corso Roma (today rechristened Martiri della Libertà); on the scaffolding covering the facade of the Palazzo delle Assicurazioni Generali, then undergoing reconstruction, in front of the north face of the Castle, a huge, scarlet advertising banner had been unfurled, inviting the friends and enemies of Socialism to come together to drink APERITIF LENIN; scuffles broke out almost every day between farm workers and extremist labourers on the one side and ex-combatants on the other

He’d made it, as they say. No longer young, and with the air, even then, of never having been so, he was glad to have left Venice (he once confessed this himself) not so much to seek his fortune in a city other than his own, as to have escaped the stricken atmosphere of a vast house on the Grand Canal in which he had witnessed within the space of a few years the deaths of both his parents and of a much-loved sister. His courteous, discreet manners were much appreciated, as were his evident disinterestedness and the fair-minded spirit of charity towards his poorer patients. But even more than for these reasons, he was appreciated for what he was: for those gold-rimmed spectacles that gleamed agreeably upon the dark earthen colour of his smooth, hairless cheeks, for the not at all off-putting chubbiness of that corpulent frame which belonged to someone with a congenital heart condition, who had miraculously outlived the crisis of puberty and was always, even in summer, wrapped up in thick English wool. (During the war, owing to his poor health, he had not been able to serve in anything other than the Office of Postal Censorship.) In short there was something in him that immediately attracted and reassured people.

Soon enough, going to Fadigati’s became more than a fashion, became a distinct pleasure. Especially on winter evenings, when the icy wind, whistling, threaded its way from the Piazza Cattedrale down Via Gorgadello, it was with frank satisfaction that the rich bourgeois, wrapped up in his fur coat, using the pretext of the faintest of sore throats to slip inside the half-closed little door, would climb up the two staircases and ring the bell at the glass door. Up there, beyond that magical luminous hatch, at which presided a nurse in a white apron, who was always young and smiling, he would find radiators going at full steam, warmer than at his own house, or even, perhaps, than at the Businessman’s Club or the Union. He would find armchairs and sofas aplenty, occasional tables always furnished with the most up-to-date papers and journals, shutters that diffused a strong, white, generous light. He would find carpets that, when one grew tired of being there, snoozing in the warmth or leafing through the illustrated reviews, beckoned him to pass from one waiting room to the next to look at the multitude of paintings and prints, both ancient and modern, hung on the walls. He would find a good-natured and sociable doctor who while personally ushering him ‘in there’ to examine the sore throat, seemed above all anxious to know, like the truly refined gentleman he was, whether his patient had had the opportunity to hear, some evenings before, at Bologna’s Teatro Communale, Aureliano Pertile in Lohengrin; or else, who knows? – if he had looked closely at the De Chirico or that little Casorati hung on such-and-such a wall in whichever waiting room, and if the De Pisis had appealed to him; and then he would express profound surprise if his patient, in response, confessed to not knowing who Filippo de Pisis was, let alone that he was a young and very promising painter from Ferrara. A comfortable, pleasing and refined setting, and what’s more, it even acted as a mental stimulus. A place where time, accursed time, which is always an insuperable problem for the provinces, passed in a delightful way.

A gesture, a grimace was enough.

It was enough even to say that Fadigati was ‘like that’, was ‘one of them’.

But sometimes, as happens in speaking of unseemly questions, and particularly of sexual abnormalities, there would be someone who, grinning, would have recourse to a dialect word, which even in our region carries a more malicious edge than the language of the upper classes. And then to add, not without a touch of melancholy:

‘Oh, it all makes sense.’

‘What a weird type, that’s for sure.’

‘How come we never thought of that before?’

Overall, though, it wasn’t as if they were too unhappy to have figured out Fadigati’s secret vice so late (it had taken them more than ten years to get there, imagine that!), but rather as if they were at some level reassured and, for the most part, were amused by it.

In the end – they exclaimed, shrugging – why should they not be able to acknowledge the sheer style of the man even in the most shameful of irregularities?

What above all disposed them to indulgence towards Fadigati and, after the first recoil of alarmed dismay, almost to admiration, was precisely that, his style, and by style first and foremost they meant one thing: his discretion, the evident care he had taken and continued to take in concealing his tastes, so as not to cause scandal. Yes – they said – now that his secret was no longer a secret, now that everything was clear as could be, at last one could be sure how to behave towards him.

Yet it was Fadigati himself, with his unimpeachable behaviour, who fostered around himself such a general spirit of tolerance.

Everyone knew how he spent his mornings, so no one had anything to say about them.

By nine he was already at the hospital, and with visits and operations (because he also did operations: there was not a day in which he didn’t have to take out a pair of tonsils or take a scalpel to a mastoid) he kept at it until one o’clock. After which, between one and two, it was not unusual to meet him once again walking up Corso Giovecca with a bag of tuna in oil or a packet of sliced ham hanging from his little finger, and with the Corriera della Sera jutting out of his coat pocket. So he ate lunch at home. And since he didn’t have a cook, and the part-time maid who kept his house and study clean only showed up around three, an hour before the nurse arrived, it must have been he – in itself a bizarre phenomenon – who prepared the indispensible plate of pasta.

After they had invited him, with great solicitude, to have a seat in their compartment, our good sporty types, who were far from being music lovers (the very name of Wagner made them plunge into an ocean of sadness!), sat there good as gold listening to Fadigati’s impassioned account of Tristan which Bruno Walter had directed that very afternoon in Florence’s Teatro Communale. Fadigati spoke of the music of Tristan, of the admirable interpretation that the ‘Teutonic maestro’ had given it, and in particular of the opera’s second Act, which – he declared – ‘was nothing but a long lament for love’. Holding forth about the little bench completely encircled by a rose bush’s flowering boughs, and thus clearly symbolic of the bridal chamber, on which Tristan and Isolde sing for three quarters of an hour running before plunging themselves, enthralled, into a night of voluptuousness eternal as Death itself, Fadigati half closed his eyes behind his glasses, and smiled ecstatically. And the others let him talk without breathing a word. They limited themselves to exchanging the occasional secret look of dismay.