At first nobody recognized Geo Josz when he reappeared in Ferrara in August 1945, the sole survivor of the one hundred and eighty-three members of the Jewish community whom the Germans had deported in the autumn of 1943 and whom most people in the city, not unreasonably, believed to have been long ago exterminated in the gas chambers.

To tell the truth, nobody even remembered who he was. Unless—some added with a doubtful air—unless he was the son of a certain Angelo Josz, the well-known textile merchant who, though initially “favored” as a reward for “patriotic merit” (he had been a Fascist in his youth), had not been able to save either himself or his family from the great roundup in 1943.

Yes, Geo must be one of those remote boys—not more than ten of them in all—who even in 1938, having been forced to interrupt their studies and, as a result, also having stopped visiting their schoolmates’ homes, were rarely seen about after that and had grown up with rather odd looks on their faces, somewhat frightened, wild, and contemptuous looks which made people prefer to forget them entirely.

But apart from all this: who could have recognized in that man of indeterminate age, so fat he seemed swollen, wearing’ a lambskin shako on his shaven skull and togged out in a kind of grab-bag of all the known and unknown uniforms of the moment—who could have recognized in him the frail seven-year-old boy or the nervous, thin, scared adolescent of several years before? And if a certain Geo Josz had ever been born and actually existed, if he too—as he asserted—had been part of that file of one hundred and eighty-three ghosts devoured by Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, etc., how could one believe that he, he alone, should come back from there now and appear—bizarrely dressed, it is true, but nevertheless very much alive—to tell all about himself and the others who had not come back and certainly never would?

But let us proceed in orderly fashion; and before going any further, let us pause for a moment at the incident involving the plaque affixed to the synagogue’s facade.

Told now, the scene may seem a bit incredible; one has only to imagine it played out against what to us is the so usual, so familiar background of Via Mazzini (not even the war has touched it: as though to prove that nothing could possibly happen here, ever!), that street, in other words, which starts from Piazza delle Erbe and, skirting the old ghetto—with the church of San Maurelio at the beginning and, halfway, Via Vittoria’s narrow fissure, and then, a little farther ahead, the synagogue’s red facade and the double, facing ranks of a hundred dry-goods stores and ground-floor warehouses, each harboring in its odor-impregnated half-darkness a little, cautious soul imbued with mercantile irony and skepticism—connects the decrepit, twisting alleyways of Ferrara’s medieval center with the splendid avenues, badly damaged by the bombardments, of the Renaissance and modern sections of the city.

Immersed in the blaze and silence of an August mid-day, Via Mazzini lay empty, deserted, intact. And so it appeared also to the young workman who, after climbing up on a small scaffolding, his head covered with a paper cap, had begun bustling around the marble slab they had given him to set in place, two meters above the ground, against the dusty brick of the synagogue. A peasant he was, compelled by the war to citify himself and improvise a trade as a mason (gradually, as he worked, he was penetrated by a sense of solitude and vague fear: he knew that the plaque commemorated something, but he had been careful not to read what was written on it), and from the first his figure had been lost in the gulf of light that filled the street, failing to annul its emptiness at that hour.

The first to stop were two youths, bearded and bespectacled Partisans, with knee-length shorts, red handkerchiefs around their necks, and tommy-guns slung over their shoulders. A little later they were joined by a priest, in spite of the heat wearing his heavy black cassock with its sleeves rolled back—he had a strangely belligerent, almost defiant manner—and exposing his white, hairy forearms. And then, afterwards, a sixty-year-old middleclass codger with a beard the color of salt-and-pepper, an obsessed air, his shirt open over his scrawny chest and restless Adam’s apple, who, after he had begun to read aloud what was presumably inscribed on the plaque (there was name after name, though, so it seemed, not all of them Italian ones), abruptly broke off and exclaimed emphatically: “One hundred and eighty-three out of four hundred,” as if even for the mason, Aristide Podetti, who was in Ferrara by chance and had no intention of staying any longer than necessary, those names and numbers could evoke God knows what sort of memories and emotion.

Poor Aristide, he was so determined not to know a thing, that feeling someone lightly touch his ankle (“Geo Josz?” a mocking voice said, at the same time), he quickly swung around, his eyes hard with anger.

A short, stocky man with a strange fur hat on his head stood in front of him. With upraised arm he was pointing at the plaque. How fat the man was! He looked swollen with water, like someone that’s been drowned. But apparently he was not to be feared, for he was laughing, as though he wanted to win his sympathy.

“Geo Josz?” the man repeated, still pointing at the plaque, though now become serious.

Then he laughed again. But immediately, as though repentant, sprinkling his remarks with many “please’s” in the German manner, he declared that he was sorry—“you must believe me”—to have spoiled everything with his interference which, he was prepared to admit, had all the look of a faux pas. Ah, yes, he sighed, the plaque would have to be done over, for the Geo Josz to whom it was in some part dedicated was none other than himself, present there in the flesh. Unless—and, saying this, his blue eyes gazed about as if to take possession of an image of Via Mazzini—unless the committee responsible for this act of homage, accepting his reappearance as a hint from destiny itself, wished to renounce the idea of a commemorative plaque altogether, which—he now sneered—though it did have the unquestionable advantage, being located at that very busy spot, of almost compelling people to read it, still, its grave disadvantage was that it effected an unsuitable transformation in the simple, straightforward facade of “our dear synagogue,” one of the few things—including Via Mazzini itself—which the war, thank God, had so completely spared that it remained just as “before,” something one (“Yes, my friend, I say this also for you who, I presume, are not a Jew”) could still count on.

“It’s somewhat as though you, with your face and your hands, were forced to—what should I say?—forced to wear a dinner jacket.”

And then he pushed out his own hands, indescribably calloused, but with backs so white that a five-figured serial number, tattooed a little above one wrist in the softish, boiled-looking flesh, could be read quite clearly—the five figures preceded by the single letter J.

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II

And so, with a look that was not threatening but rather ironic and amused (his watery blue eyes looked up frigidly, as though, pallid and puffed up as he was, he had just emerged from the depths of the sea), Geo Josz reappeared among us in Ferrara.

He came from far away, much farther away than the place he had actually come from! And then, all of a sudden, turning up like that, where he had been born. . . .

It seems that it had happened as follows, more or less. The military truck he had boarded had taken him in a few hours from Brenner Pass to the Po Valley and, after leaving the ferry at Pontelagoscuro, had slowly climbed the left bank of the Po; and there, at the very top, after a last, almost reluctant bump, his gaze fell on the vast, forgotten plain of his childhood and adolescence. Down there below him, a trifle to the left, should be Ferrara. But was it Ferrara? he asked both himself and the driver beside him. Was Ferrara that dark polygon of dusty stone which, save for the Castle’s four towers that rose up aerial and unreal at its center, seemed to be reduced to a kind of lugubrious flatiron that pressed down heavily on the fields? Where were the green, luminous, ancient trees that used to stand along the crest of the truncated city walls? Only two years had passed since he had been deported, but they were two years that counted as twenty or two hundred.

He had come back when no one any longer expected him. And now, what did he want? To answer such a question calmly—with that calm which is required for understanding and pitying what at first had been probably no more than a simple, even if unexpressed, desire to live—we perhaps needed another time, another city.

At any rate we needed other people, a little less terrified than certain gentlemen who were still, as always, the touchstones of the city’s opinions (among whom, besides a few big merchants and landowners, were numbered many of Ferrara’s most authoritative professional men, in short, the core of what had been before the war our so-called ruling class), people who had been forced to “enroll” more or less in a body in the defunct, last-ditch “Social Republic” of Salò established by the Fascists, people who could not resign themselves to standing aside even for a little while, who saw everywhere plots, enemies, even political rivals. It’s true, they had accepted the notorious party membership card. But they had been prompted to do it by purely civic feeling. And, in any case, they hadn’t done it before that fatal day, December 15, 1943, which had seen the simultaneous execution of eleven of the town’s citizens and out of which began in Italy the never sufficiently deprecated “fraternal strife.” Riddled with bullets right opposite the arcade of the Exchange Café—where the corpses had lain for an entire day, guarded closely by soldiers with tommy-guns at the ready—with their own eyes they had seen the bodies of those “unlucky ones,” flung in the dirty melting snow like so many bundles. Yes, that’s how they all talked now, all of them driven by the desire to convince others and themselves that, if they had made a political mistake, they had done it more out of generosity than from fear. In any event, they surely couldn’t be considered the types most apt to recognize in others that simplicity and normality of aim, that famous “purity” of deed and intention which, when it came to themselves, they could never forget for even a moment.

As for the specific case of the man in the shako, even assuming that he was Geo Josz—and they were, however, by no means convinced!—assuming this, they still had to distrust him. That fat of his, all that fat, made them suspicious. Of course, it was starvation fat. But who, if not Geo himself, could have spread such a story in an awkward attempt to justify a robust good health that was in such singular contrast with what was said about German concentration camps? There was no such thing as “starvation fat,” it was a pure and simple fabrication. In truth Geo’s fat meant one of two things: either that one did not suffer in the Lager so tremendously from hunger as the progaganda maintained, or else that Geo had enjoyed particularly favorable conditions. One fact was certain: under that fur cap, behind those lips curled in a perpetual smile, there could only be room—they could swear it—for hostile thoughts and plans.

And what was to be said about the others—a minority, as a matter of fact—who remained barricaded in their houses, their ears pricked for the slightest sound from outside, the very image of fear and hatred?

Among this last group there was one man who had offered to preside, a big tricolored sash plastered across his chest, at the public auction of the property confiscated from the Jewish community, which also included the synagogue’s silver chandeliers and the ancient vellums of the Torah; and that other man who, setting on his white-haired head his black, skull-adorned Fascist uniform cap, had taken part in a special Tribunal responsible for several executions.

But of course there’s no way to reason with fear and hatred. If, to return to Geo Josz himself, they had really wished to understand something of what was going on inside of him, it would have been enough to go back to his first extraordinary appearance in Ferrara, indeed to what happened after that singular scene when, right beside the entrance to the synagogue on Via Mazzini, he had offered his hands—not without sarcasm—to the young mason’s stunned inspection.

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You may perhaps recall the gentleman of about sixty with the sparse, grizzled beard and the scrawny neck, who was one of the first to stop before the memorial marble slab and had at one point raised his high-pitched voice (“One hundred and eighty-three out of four hundred” he had cried out proudly) to comment on its inscription.

Well, after watching along with the others what was happening, this gentleman had suddenly pushed his way with wild gestures through the small crowd and thrown himself on the neck of the man in the shako, kissing him noisily on both cheeks, thus proving to be the first person unmistakably to recognize in him Geo Josz. And Josz, whose hands were still outstretched, said very coldly: “With that absurd goatee my dear Uncle Daniele, I almost didn’t know you”—a remark which not only revealed the relationship between him and one of the Josz family’s surviving representative citizens (to be precise, his father’s brother, who had miraculously escaped the great roundup in November 1943, and had returned to the city at the end of last April), but also the sharp, profound intolerance that he, Geo, had immediately shown for everything that reminded him of the passage of time in Ferrara and for all those changes, however slight, which had been brought about by it.

And so: “Why that beard? Do you really think that beard becomes you?”

It actually seemed that he had nothing else in his head but a wish to examine with a critical eye all the beards of various shapes and sizes that the war had made a commonplace, just as it had the use of the famous forged documents; and since he was not a loquacious type, this was his way of evincing his disapproval, of criticizing.

And there were, of course, a great many beards in what had been the Josz house before the war, where the uncle and nephew showed up that same afternoon; and the low red-stone house, surmounted by a slender Ghibelline tower and so very long that it took up almost a whole side of the short, secluded Via Campofranco, was invaded by a warlike, feudal atmosphere.

The street door was wide open. Outside, sitting on the entrance steps with tommy-guns between their bare legs, or stretched out on the seats of a jeep pulled up against the high wall that separated Via Campofranco from a vast private garden, a dozen Partisans were hanging around, loafing. But there were many more, some carrying voluminous sheafs of paper clutched under their arms, who despite the late afternoon sultriness, restlessly shuttled back and forth, their faces marked with energy and resolve.

So this strange pair—one tall, thin, obsessed-looking; the other fat, slow, sticky with sweat—passed through the portico and instantly attracted the attention of all present—most of them armed, as usual, with a superfluity of hair and beard—who sat there waiting on crude benches set along the wall. They clustered around; and Daniele Josz, who evidently was eager to show his nephew how much at home he was in this environment, was already replying willingly to all questions concerning him and also his companion.

But Geo stared at all those ruddy, bronzed faces that hovered about him, as if he wanted to ferret out some secret that lay behind those beards, some hidden rottenness.

“Aah, you can’t get me to swallow this!” his smile said.

Only for a moment did he seem to brighten, when he discovered beyond the portico’s iron gate, upright and still gleaming at the center of the plucked little garden that lay out there, a great magnolia tree, brown and flourishing. But this wasn’t enough to keep him from repeating, a little later on, upstairs in the office of the young Provincial Secretary of the ANPI¹ (the same man who two years later was to become the most brilliant young Communist Deputy in Italy) his by now stale observation: “That beard isn’t at all becoming, you know that, don’t you?”

So in the embarrassed chill that at once descended on what had until then been, thanks solely to Uncle Daniele, a conversation not without some cordiality, suddenly it became clear what Geo Josz really wanted, the reason for his being there (and if all those who feared him so much had only been there to witness this scene!). This house where they, just like the others before them, those black ones, had installed themselves—this house was his, didn’t they remember? By what right had they taken possession of it? He looked menacingly at the typist, who flinched and suddenly ceased pounding the keys, as though he wished to inform her, just her, that he wouldn’t be contented with only one room, no, not even this one, so beautiful and sunny, where it was so comfortable to work from dawn to dusk, and perhaps even after dusk, together with that young Partisan chief who seemed so determined, out of the sheer goodness of his heart, to renovate the world.

They were singing, below in the street:

The wind whistles, the tempest howls,
Our shoes are broken, but still we slog on. . .

the song came, impetuous and absurd, through the window that opened on a soft red, very lovely sky.

But the house was his, they musn’t fool themselves on that score. Sooner or later he would take it back, all of it.

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III

And that’s what actually took place, though not right away.

For the time being Geo seemed to be satisfied with a single room—and it certainly wasn’t Nino Bottecchiari’s office! Instead it was a sort of granary at the top of the tower that rose above the house and to reach it one had to climb not less than a hundred steps which, finally, by means of a rotted little wooden stairway, led directly into it from a cubby-hole of a room below, in the past used as a lumber room. It was Geo himself, in the disgusted tones of a man who resigns himself to the worst, who first mentioned this “compromise.” As for the cubbyhole below, that too might prove to be rather useful, for it could, as he intended, provide a lodging for Uncle Daniele.

And it soon became clear that Geo, perched high up there, could observe through his window all that went on in the garden on one side and in Via Campofranco on the other. And since he never left the house and presumably spent the greater part of his day gazing at the vast landscape of red tiles, gardens, and green fields that stretched out at his feet (an immense panorama, now that the great leafy trees on the city walls were no longer there to limit it!), his continual presence soon became a nagging, troubling thought to the occupants of the floors below. The cellars of the Josz house, all opening on the garden, had been transformed since the Black Shirt Brigade’s day into secret prison cells about which, even after the liberation, many sinister stories were told in the city. But now, subjected to the vigilance of the guest in the tower, the cells were no longer employed for those purposes of summary, clandestine justice for which they had been created. Now, with Geo Josz settled in that sort of lookout, they couldn’t rest easy for even a minute, since that keresone lamp he kept lit all night long—and you could see its feeble reflection gleam through the panes up there until dawn—led one to surmise that he was always alert, that he never slept. It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning when Nino Bottecchiari, who had stayed on till then working in his office and was at last ready to grant himself a little rest, happened, just as he walked out into the street, to raise his eyes to the tower. “You better watch out!” Geo’s lamp warned, hung up there in mid-air against the starry sky.

But there was also the possibility that Geo might appear from one minute to the next, as indeed he began to, at all hours of the day, on the stairs or down in the entrance-way, walking past the stares of the permanently assembled Partisans in his impeccable civilian suit of olive-colored gabardine which had almost immediately replaced the shako, leather jacket, and tight trousers in which he had arrived at Ferrara. He walked past the stupefied Partisans without greeting a soul, elegant, immaculately trimmed and shaved, the brim of his brown felt hat tilted on one side of his forehead over an ice-cold eye; and in the widespread uneasiness that followed each of his appearances, he was from the start the unquestioned master of the house, too well-bred to quarrel, but strong in his rights, for whom it was enough just to show himself to remind the defaulting, vandalistic tenant that he must leave. It was later, after the 1948 elections, when so many things in Ferrara had by now changed, or, to put it more exactly, had returned to the way they’d been before the war (but meanwhile young Bottecchiari’s candidacy for Deputy had been presented just in time to be crowned by the most resounding success), it was then that the ANPI decided to move its headquarters elsewhere. At any rate the truth is that, thanks to Geo Josz’s silent implacable activity, the move had been long overdue.

He almost never went out of the house, as if he didn’t want them to forget him even for a moment. But this didn’t prevent him from putting in an appearance every so often on Via Mazzini, where in September he had arranged for his father’s warehouse to be cleared out in view of—as he said—“the obviously more than necessary work of repair preparatory to the resumption of business.” Or, more rarely, he walked along Corso Giovecca with the uncertain step of someone advancing into forbidden territory, his spirit torn between the fear of unpleasant encounters and the completely opposed, mordant desire to make these encounters, in the evening promenade he had begun taking again, as animated and lively as ever; or, at the aperitif hour, he would slump with a crash—for he always arrived there breathless, streaming with sweat—into his chair at the table in the Exchange Café on Corso Roma, which still remained the city’s political center. His attitude of ironic scorn was habitual—and gave no sign of being disarmed by those expressions of cordial welcome, those affectionate “welcome home’s” that, after the first moments of uncertainty, he began to receive on all sides.

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There they came, out of the shops near the one that had been his father’s and now was his, their hands extended as though to offer him help or actually to promise, with hyperbolic generosity, their loyal competition to eternity; or, wide as it was, they would purposely traverse Corso Po and with excessive enthusiasm, rendered even more hysterical by the fact that, usually, they knew him only by name, throw their arms around his neck; or they would detach themselves from the bar’s counter to come and sit beside him under the yellow awning that protected them so inadequately from the sun and the rubble’s dust. He had been at Buchenwald and—the only one!—had come back, after having suffered God knows what physical and moral tortures, after having witnessed God knows what horrors. Well, they were there, at his disposal, all ears, to listen to him. Let him tell his story, and they would never tire of it, prepared even to give up for him that dinner to which they were already being summoned by two strokes of the Castle’s clock.

In general all this seemed to amount to equally pathetic excuses for having delayed in recognizing him, for having attempted to reject him, to exclude him once more. It was as though they were saying, in chorus: “You’ve changed, you know that? My God, you’re a grown man now, and then so nicely filled out, so fat. But we too have changed, you see, time has passed for us too . . .” and, meanwhile, they displayed, as testimony to their good faith and proof of the evolution which their “ideas” had undergone during these terrible, decisive years, their duck trousers, their bush-jackets, their rolled-up sleeves, their soft collars without ties, their sandals without socks, but no beards, naturally, for they didn’t wear them . . . and they were sincere each time they offered themselves to Geo’s scrutiny and judgment, and just as sincere afterwards when they complained about his inflexible rejection of them. In the same way that almost everyone in the city was sincere in the conviction—even those who had most to fear from the present and to doubt concerning the future—the conviction that after April 1945, for better or worse, a new age was beginning, at any rate better than the past one which, like a long dream filled with atrocious nightmares, was now ending in bloodshed.

As for Uncle Daniele, who for three months had been living by hook or crook and without regular lodging, the stifling little cubby-hole in the tower had immediately seemed, to his incurable optimism, a marvelous acquisition; and no one was more certain than he that, with the war’s end, the golden age of democracy and universal brotherhood was really at hand.

“At last, you can breathe!” he ventured to say the first night he had taken possession of that dank well of his—and he talked stretched out on his straw mattress, his hands laced behind his neck. “At last, you can breathe. Aaah!” he repeated in a louder voice. And then: “Doesn’t it seem also to you, Geo, that the air in the city is different from before? Things have changed, believe me, not just on the surface, but deep down. These are the miracles wrought by freedom. As for me, I am profoundly convinced. . . .”

What Uncle Daniele was profoundly convinced of seemed, however, of very doubtful interest to Geo, since all reply that he ever let fall through the opening out of which came up both the small wooden stairway and his uncle’s impassioned apostrophes was an occasional “Hmm!” or “But really?” which certainly did not encourage the old man to continue. “What in the world will he do now?” the old man asked himself, falling silent, while his eyes turned to the ceiling over which a tireless pair of slippers shuffled back and forth—and truly he didn’t know what to think.

It seemed impossible to him that Geo should not share his enthusiasm. Having run away from Ferrara at the time of the armistice, Daniele had spent almost two years as the guest of some peasants, hidden in a remote village in the Appennines between Tuscany and Emilia. And while up there, after the death of his wife who had had to be buried—poor woman, and she so religious!—under a false name in Christian ground, he had joined a Partisan brigade as its political commissar. He had been among the first, sun-tanned and bearded, sitting on the peak of a truck, to enter liberated Ferrara. What unforgettable days! Finding the city half-demolished, it’s true, almost unrecognizable, but completely cleared of Fascists-cleared of all those faces, a good number of which Daniele had reason to remember. Yes, this had been for him so complete, so extraordinary a joy! To sit peacefully at the Exchange Café—which, as soon as he returned, he had used as the base of operations for his former, modest insurance business—without anyone frowning and ordering him out, but, on the contrary, making him feel well-liked and surrounded by sympathetic warmth—now that he had at last fulfilled this desire, he was even ready to die!

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But what about Geo? Was it possible that Geo felt nothing of all this? Could it be that, after having descended into hell and, by a miracle, come up again, his only impulse was to evoke the immobile past?—as was proved by the chilling array of photographs of his dead family (poor Angelo, poor Luce, and little Pietruccio, born only to experience violence and anguish and to end in Buchenwald . . .), photographs that, as he saw one day when he sneaked up to Geo’s room, covered all four walls. Could it be, finally, that the only beard in the city to which he did not object was actually Jeremiah Tabet’s, that old Fascist, poor Angelo’s brother-in-law, who, even after 1938, despite the racial laws and the ostracism that followed them, had continued, though unofficially, to frequent the Merchants’ Club for its afternoon bridge game?

The very same evening of Geo’s return, he, Daniele, had been unwillingly compelled to accompany his nephew to the Tabet house on Via Roversella, where Daniele hadn’t been seen since he had come back to the city. Well, wasn’t it inconceivable—the ex-political commissar, the sixty-year-old ex-partisan kept repeating to himself, as, meanwhile, in the room above, his nephew never ceased to walk heavily back and forth—wasn’t it inconceivable that Geo, as soon as his Fascist uncle had appeared at an upstairs window, should have let loose a piercing shout, a ridiculously, hysterically emotional, almost savage shout? Why this shout? What did it signify? Did it perhaps mean that the boy, in spite of Buchenwald and the slaughter of all his family, had grown up just like his poor father Angelo who, in his ingenuousness, had been to the end, perhaps even to the door of the gas chamber, a “patriot,” as Daniele had so many times heard him profess with stolid pride?

“Who’s there?” a worried voice had called out from above.

“It’s me, Uncle Jeremiah. It’s Geo!”

The two of them, Geo and Daniele, stood below in front of the closed street door of the Tabet house. It was ten o’clock by now and standing there in the darkness at the bottom of the alley they couldn’t see more than a pace away. Geo’s shout—Daniele Josz remembered—had made him start with surprise. It had been a strange kind of yell, strangled by the most violent, inexplicable emotions: surprise and embarrassment and the inability to say anything. In silence, bumping into each other and stumbling on the steps, they had groped their way in absolute darkness up two steep flights of stairs.

Finally, at the top of the stairs, half in; and half out the door, Attorney Jeremiah had appeared in person, wearing pajamas. In his right hand he was holding a small plate with a candle stuck on it, whose wavering light cast vague, greenish reflections on his naturally pale face framed by a pointed, slightly grizzled beard. As soon as he saw him, he, Daniele Josz, came to a halt. It was the first time since the war had ended; and if he was now about to pay him a visit, he had been led to do it only to please Geo who, on the other hand, after his inspection of the house on Via Campofranco a few hours before, had seemed to have nothing else on his mind but “my Uncle Jeremiah.”

Setting the candle on the floor, Attorney Tabet had clasped his nephew to his breast in a long embrace; and that was all that was needed for Daniele, the third, awkward party there, who stood watching the scene from the dark landing below, forgotten down there like some outsider, to feel again the poor relation whom all of them—his own brother Angelo in accord on that point also with the Tabets—had always avoided and scorned because of his “subversive” ideas. He ought to go away, run off without even saying hello. Never put foot in that house again. What a pity it was that he had resisted the temptation! In fact what had held him there was a hope, an absurd hope. After all, he had thought, poor Luce, Geo’s mother, was a Tabet, Jeremiah’s sister. Perhaps it was only the memory of his mother that now, at first, kept Geo from treating his uncle with the coldness which the old Fascist deserved. . . .

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But Daniele had deceived himself, unfortunately; and for the rest of the evening, indeed, until late into the night, since it seemed that Geo could never bring himself to leave, he had been forced to witness, seated in a corner of the parlor, a parade of affection and intimacy that for him was nothing short of disgusting.

It was as if instinctively there had been established an understanding between those two, and it was this: Geo would make no allusion, even indirectly, to his uncle’s political errors, and, on his side, his uncle would avoid asking his nephew to talk about what he had seen and suffered in Germany, where, after all, he too had lost—as those people ought to remember who wanted to throw up to him some petty youthful errors, some only-too-human mistake in political choice—a sister, a brother-in-law, and a beloved nephew. What a misfortune, of course, what a tragic destiny! But a sense of proportion and discretion (the past was the past—no point in digging it up again!) ought by now to dominate every other impulse. Better to look ahead, to the future. And, in fact, while we were on the subject of the future, what sort of plans—Jeremiah Tabet had asked, assuming the serious but benevolent tone of the family head who can see far into the future and is capable of handling many problems—what sort of plans did Geo have? He was certainly thinking of reopening his father’s store, a noble aspiration which he could approve of, since, moreover, at least the warehouse was still there. But if he wanted the enterprise to succeed he needed money, a lot of money; what he should do is make a loan from a bank. Could he perhaps help him there? He hoped so, he really and truly hoped so.

If, for the time being, however, since the house on Via Campofranco was occupied by the “Reds,” he might want to come and live temporarily with them, he would always be able to scare up for him, if not a real bed, at least some sort of pallet!

It was at this precise point—Daniele Josz recalled—that he, looking up with renewed interest, had tried once more, though in vain, to understand what it was that was going on.

Sweating profusely, even though in his pajamas, Attorney Tabet sat with his elbows resting on the great black refectory table in whose center the candle was now guttering; and meanwhile, perplexed, he twisted the tip of his little graying goatee, that Fascist goatee which he alone among the old “first-hour” Fascists of Ferrara had had the courage, or the impudence, or perhaps—who knows?—the shrewdness not to shave off. As for Geo, while he shook his head politely, declining the offer, from the other side of the table he fixed his cerulean blue eyes with a stare of fanatical, obstinate intensity right on that now graying beard and the pudgy hand that was tugging at it.

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Autumn ended and then winter came, the long, cold winter of the country hereabouts. Spring returned. And slowly, along with the spring, though still as though Geo’s scrutinizing stare alone had conjured it up, the past returned too.

It is strange, isn’t it? Yet time began to arrange matters in such a way that it made you think a kind of secret dynamic relationship existed between Geo and Ferrara, between us and Geo. It is difficult, I know, to explain clearly. On one side there was the progressive reabsorption by Geo’s body of those unhealthy humors which from his first appearance on Via Mazzini last August had caused so more discussion and perplexity. On the other side there was the simultaneous burgeoning, at first timidly, then more and more openly and decisively, of a moral and physical image of Ferrara and of ourselves which nobody, in his heart, had not wished at one time to forget.

Gradually Geo got thinner, recovering as the months went by—save for his sparse hair, prematurely graying at the temples—a face which his smooth cheeks made even more youthful. But the city also, after the highest piles of rubble had been cleared away and the initial frenzy for superficial changes had worked itself off, reassumed that sleepy, decrepit countenance formed by centuries of clerical decadence—a countenance that by now was a fixed mask which no future time could alter. Everything in Geo spoke of his desire, indeed his demand, to go back to being a boy, that boy he once was, of course, and yet—after having been hurled into the timeless hell of Buchenwald—had never been able to be. And now, just look! we, his fellow citizens, who had been witnesses to his boyhood and adolescence, though we remembered him as a boy only vaguely (but he certainly remembered us, so diverse from what we were today), we went back to being what we had been before the war, what we had always been. Why resist it? If he wanted it that way and if, above all, we were like that, why not be satisfied with it?—we began to think with sudden self-indulgence and weariness.

May arrived.

So this is why, one thought, smiling to oneself, just so an absurd regret might not appear too absurd and his, Geo’s, illusion might be perfect, it was for this that whole ranks of linked pretty girls on bicycles began to ride again through Via Mazzini, their handle bars overflowing with wild flowers, pedaling slowly to the center of the city from excursions into the surrounding countryside. And it was, moreover, for the same reason that simultaneously, emerging from God knows what hiding place to lean his back against the marble doorjamb which for centuries had supported one of the three ghetto gates, the hermetic little figure of the notorious Count Scocca reappeared down there at the street corner, unalterable as a small stone idol, the symbol for all of us—no one excepted—of the so variously beatific entre deux guerres.

And since, in the meantime, the latest generation of Ferrara’s pretty girls, exciting open exclamations of praise from the narrow sidewalks and more secret side-long glances of admiration from the dark depths of the shops behind, had on one of those evenings almost finished their slow ascent up Via Mazzini and, in fact, were just about to enter Piazza delle Erbe, laughing as they pedaled along; here, before this spectacle of life eternally renewing itself yet always the same, indifferent to men’s passions and problems, there was indeed no rancor, however obstinate, that could possibly hold out. Via Mazzini’s small stage presented on its left the serried, luminous ranks of girl cyclists, coming out of the sunlight that poured from the bottom of the street, and on its right, motionless and gray as the wall he was leaning against, Count Lionello Scocca. How could one help but smile at such a sight, bathed in a light that appeared almost the very light of posterity? How could one not be moved at that epiphanic showing forth of a sort of wise allegory which in a trice reconciled everything: the anguishing, atrocious past with a present so much more serene and rich with promises? It is certain that anyone seeing the elderly, penniless aristocrat languidly resume his old observation post—from which it was possible for him, whose sight was perfect and hearing acute, to watch over the entire length of Via Mazzini and at the same time the adjacent Piazza delle Erbe—anyone would have suddenly lacked the heart to reproach him for having been for years the paid informer of the OVRA and having directed from 1939 to 1943 the local chapter of the Italo-German Cultural Institute. That Hitler mustache, for example, which he had grown for the occasion, and still preserved, now inspired only thoughts, tinged with sympathy—and, after all, why not?—even gratitude.

It therefore seemed scandalous that Geo Josz, however, had behaved toward Count Scocca—at bottom, a harmless caricature—in a way that not only was lacking in sympathy and gratitude but even in the most elementary sense of humanity and discretion. And our surprise was all the greater since he and his bizarre behavior had for some time now been accepted with benevolent, comprehending smiles. To mention Geo and his famous whims (“He’s got something against beards! If it weren’t for this . . .”) and then to assume the resigned air of someone obliged, constrained to behave in a certain way “just to satisfy him” or, above all, “to do him a favor”: this was the general attitude and, at the same time, the profound truth.

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At first the incident seemed incredible. Nobody believed it. Absolutely no one could succeed in picturing the scene: Geo entering, without surprise, with his shuffling gait, into Count Scocca’s field of vision; Count Scocca who stood there leaning against the wall; Geo who struck the parchment-like cheeks of the resurrected old spy two hard, sharp slaps, “like a true Fascist squadrista.” Yet surely the event had taken place; a whole crowd of people had witnessed it. But on the other hand: wasn’t it rather strange that there immediately circulated several conflicting versions of how it had actually happened? One almost began to doubt not only the correctness of each version, but even the true, objective reality of that double slap, that pow! pow! so loud and ringing, everyone agreed, that it could be heard quite a distance along Via Mazzini—from the church of San Maurelio, a few yards from the point where the Count stood, all the way down to the Jewish synagogue and even farther.

To many people Geo’s gesture remained absolutely inexplicable. A few minutes before he had been seen walking in the same direction as the girls on the bicycles, strolling slowly, allowing them gradually to pass him by. And nothing on his face, which he kept fixed on the center of the street and on which might be read mixed feelings of joy and stupefaction, could have led one to imagine what was to occur one minute later. When he came up to Count Scocca and detached his eyes from the trio of cyclists about to cross into Piazza delle Erbe from Via Mazzini, suddenly Geo halted, as if the Count’s presence at that time and place seemed to him somewhat inconceivable. In any case his hesitation was very brief. Just long enough for him to wrinkle his brows, tighten his lips, convulsively clench his fists, blurt out something brusque and incoherent. After which, as if he were worked by a spring, he literally swooped down on the poor Count, who, for his part, had until then given no sign of being aware of him.

Was this all? But there must be a cause, there had to be—other people objected, twisting their lips dubiously. Count Scocca had not noticed Geo’s arrival; about this fact, no matter how strange it might seem in itself, they all found themselves substantially in agreement. But how could one believe that Geo had become aware of the Count just at the very moment when the three girl cyclists, at whom Geo was avidly staring, were slowly fading into the golden haze of Piazza delle Erbe?

According to this second group, the Count, instead of standing there immobile and silent to gaze at the landscape, only concerned with living up to his own and the city’s picture of himself, the Count had been doing something. And this “something,” which was perceptible only to those a few yards from the scene—also because, despite everything, the Count’s lips had persisted in shifting his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other—this “something” was a soft whistle, so weak as to appear more casual than timid: a little idle accidental whistle that would have certainly passed unnoticed if the tune which it hinted at had been anything other than “Lili Marlene.” (But wasn’t this, after all, the most delightful of details, for which they ought to be even more grateful than ever to the old informer?)

“Tutte le sere all’ ombra del fanal—”

Count Scocca was whistling, softly but clearly, and his glance also, despite his seventy-odd years, was lost in the wake of the cycling girls. Perhaps, neglecting to whistle for a moment, he too had joined his voice to the chorus of praise that rose from the sidewalks of Via Mazzini, murmuring in dialect with our customary sensual Emilian heartiness: “God bless you!” or “Blessed be you and the mother who made you!” But sheer bad luck had so ordered things that that idle, peaceful, innocent whistle—innocent to anybody else but Geo, naturally—had issued immediately afterwards from his lips. Needless to say, from this point to the very end, the second version of the incident tallies completely with the first.

But there was a third version, and this one, like the first, does not at all mention “Lili Marlén,” nor any other sort of whistling more or less innocent or provocatory.

If this last group is to be believed, it was Count Scocca himself who stopped Geo. “Hey!” he had cried, seeing him pass by. Suddenly Geo had halted. And then the Count had immediately begun talking to him, starting right off with his full name (“Well, well, you don’t happen to be Geo Josz, the son of my old friend Angelo?”), for Lionello Scocca knew everything about everybody, and the years he had had to spend in hiding (God knows where or how) had in no way clouded his memory or lessened his ability to pick one face out of a thousand—even if it were a face like Geo’s that had become a man’s, not in Ferrara, but in Buchenwald! And so for some time before Geo leaped at the old man and slapped him with no regard for his age or anything else, the two of them had gone on talking quite affably, the Count questioning Geo about Angelo Josz’s demise, for whom—he said—he had always had great affection, and also informing himself in detail on the fate of the rest of his family, even Pietruccio, both deploring those “horrible excesses” and congratulating Geo on his return, while Geo replied with a certain embarrassed reluctance, it is true, but in short did reply; in appearance no different from two normal citizens who stop on the sidewalk to chat about this and that while waiting for dusk to come. What, then, had driven Geo suddenly to assault the Count, who hadn’t, if one was to believe this version, said anything which could in any way have offended or hurt his interlocutor, and hadn’t given the slightest sign, at that very moment, of emitting even the softest of whistles? Geo’s whole bizarre character could be found there—according to those who told this story—could be found in this “enigma”; and the gossip and guessing devoted to this matter were not to end soon.

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Whatever way the incident had really taken place, one fact was certain: from that May evening onwards many things changed. If somebody wanted to comprehend, he comprehended. The others, the majority, were at least given to understand that a turn had been made, something grave and irrevocable had occurred.

The very next day, for example, people could actually see for themselves how thin Geo had become.

Ridiculous as a scarecrow, he reappeared amid wonder, uneasiness, and general alarm, dressed in the same clothes, shako and leather jacket included, that he had worn when he had returned from Germany in August 1945. But now they were so large on him—nor had he, it was obvious, done anything to fix them—that they seemed to be flapping on a clothes hanger. The people watched him come up Corso Giovecca in the morning sun that gleamed gaily, tranquilly on his rags, and they could hardly believe their own eyes. So that was it, all through these months he had done nothing but lose weight, shrivel up! Slowly he had reduced himself to a mere shell! But nobody was able to laugh about it. Seeing him go across Corso Giovecca in front of the City Theater and then turn up Corso Roma (he crossed the street carefully, watching the cars and bicycles with all the caution of an old man), there were very few who didn’t inwardly shudder.

And so, from that morning on, without even changing his garb, Geo installed himself, so to say, permanently at the Exchange Café on Corso Roma, where one by one were coming back, if not actually the recent torturers and murderers of the Black Brigade—who, of course, were still kept in hiding by judicial sentences already regarded as “untimely”—at least the old wielders of clubs, the dispensers of castor oil in 1922 and 1924, whom the war had overturned and swept into oblivion. Covered with rags, Geo would stare from his table at their small groups with a certain half-defiant, half-beseeching air. And his attitude contrasted—all to his disadvantage, naturally—with the timidity, the wish not to become too noticeable, that every gesture of yesterday’s tyrants revealed. Old by now, inoffensive, with the ruinous signs that years of misfortune had multiplied on their faces and bodies, yet reserved, well-bred, well-dressed, they seemed so much more human, so much more touching and deserving of pity than that other one, that Geo. What did he want, that Geo Josz?—many began to ask themselves. After all, the time of perplexity and uncertainty, the time—which now seemed almost heroic!—when before taking even the smallest decision one would, as the saying goes, split each hair and dot each i—that period immediately after the war, so full of romanticism, so favorable to moral problems and examinations of conscience, could unfortunately no longer be recalled. So what did Geo Josz want? It was, of course, the same old question, but formulated now without secret fears, with the impatient brutality that life, eager to obtain its due, now demanded of them.

It was for this reason, I say, that there were very few customers of the Exchange Café who were still able to make the effort of getting up from their wicker chairs, negotiating the few yards necessary, and finally sitting down next to Geo.

There were, however, a few—more disinclined than the others to give way to their inner sensation of revulsion. But the feeling of dismay which each time they brought away from these self-imposed corvées was always the same. But it wasn’t possible, they would exclaim, to converse with a man in a disguise! And, on the other hand, if you let him talk, he would immediately start telling you about Fossoli, about Germany, about Buchenwald, and the death of all of his relatives; and he’d go on like that for hours on end until you were so dazed you didn’t know how you could give him the slip. There, at the café, under the yellow awning, which, billowing up laterally in the gusts of sirocco, unavailingly tried to shelter the small tables and chairs from the raging afternoon sun, all you could do was sit.

And meanwhile Geo would be repeating the words that his father had whispered to him before falling exhausted on the path that led from the lager to the salt mine where they both worked; and then, not satisfied, he would re-enact his mother’s little gesture of farewell at the gloomy railroad station in the middle of a woods, when she had been herded off together with the other women; and then, continuing doggedly, he would tell you about Pietruccio, his little brother, who sat next to him in the dark truck that took them from the railroad through the pine woods to the camp’s barracks, and then, all of a sudden, had disappeared, just like that, without a cry or a complaint, and they had never known anything more about him, neither at that time nor ever afterwards. . . . Horrible, of course, terribly painful. But there was something excessive in all this—all the people who returned from these long and depressing sessions unanimously declared, though not, it should also be said, without honest wonder at their own coldness—there was something false, forced. Who knows? Perhaps it was the fault of the propaganda—they would add, to excuse themselves. The truth is that they had already heard, and at the proper time, so many stories of this kind that by now to have them served up to you just when the Castle clock was announcing the luncheon or dinner hour, well, quite frankly, one couldn’t quite shake off a sensation of boredom and even incredulity.

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Throughout the rest of 1946, all of 1947, and a good part of 1948, the always more ragged and desolate figure of Geo Josz never ceased to be there, right before our eyes. In the streets, the piazzas, the movie houses, the theaters, at the soccer fields, the public ceremonies: one would turn one’s head and there he would be, tireless, always with that shadow of saddened amazement in his eyes, as though he asked for nothing more from you but the chance to strike up a conversation. But everybody fled from him like the plague. Nobody understood. Nobody wanted to understand.

It would have been quite understandable—they generally admitted—if, just back from Buchenwald, his spirit still tortured by anguish and anxiety, he had shut himself up in his house, or, on going out, rather than walk along streets like Corso Giovecca, so spacious and open that it sometimes made the most normal of people a bit dizzy, he had instinctively sought out the old city’s twisting little streets, the ghetto’s dark, narrow alleyways. But that later, after putting away the gabardine suit which Squarcia, the town’s best tailor, had made to order for him, and then, togged out in his lugubrious deportee’s uniform, he had taken pains to appear wherever there were people desirous of enjoying themselves or, quite simply, filled with the healthy wish to get out of the shallows of that filthy postwar period, to forge ahead in some way, to “reconstruct”—what possible excuse could he find for such extravagant and offensive conduct? What did it matter to him that more than a year after the war’s end they had decided to open a new outdoor dance hall beyond Porta San Benedetto—yes, that’s right—at the curve of the Doro? And this wasn’t one of the usual places, not at all—it was a very modern establishment in real American style. Of course only a maniacal hater of life could have gotten it into his head to be inexorably opposed to so gay, so pleasant a club. What was wrong? During the first months almost everybody dropped by there after leaving the movie late, bent on having some sort of midnight snack. But often they would actually wind up by dining there; and then afterwards they would start dancing to the music of a radio-phonograph, mingling with the groups of travelers and truckdrivers, all of them having a gay time until dawn. It was quite natural, after all. Ferrara’s society, upset and disordered by the war, was trying to find itself. Life was beginning again. And when one begins again, everybody knows, it’s best not to look too closely in anybody’s face.

That evening at the dance-hall, for example, where he had begun showing right and left the snapshots of those relatives of his who perished at Buchenwald, he had reached such extreme petulance as to try to buttonhole young boys and girls who at that moment only wished—for the orchestra had just started playing again—to fling themselves, clasped in each others’ arms, on to the dance floor. And these weren’t fantasies, hundreds of people had seen him do it.

But he wanted a scandal, it was obvious: and this was so true that that famous night when he had insisted on forcing his way into the Friends of America Club (this was in February 1947), the waiters had seen appear before them not a decently dressed gentleman but rather a strange type who looked like some beggar, his neck shaved like a jailbird’s—who from the vestibule packed with topcoats and furs hung on display, began loudly proclaiming that he was duly enrolled in this club (which, it turned out, was quite true) and therefore entitled to frequent it whenever he pleased. And, furthermore, what right had they, these critics, to blame the club for having taken so drastic a step in Geo’s case, when already that preceding autumn they had voted unanimously to return as quickly as possible to the glorious old name of the Union Club, once again restricting their rolls to the aristocracy—the Costabili, the Del Sale, the Maffei, the Scroffa, the Scocca, etc.—and to the most select group of the middle class? If it had been right to welcome almost anyone into the Friends of America, pro temporum calamitatibus, without making any difficulties, the Union Club, after all, had certain standards, certain age-old customs, certain natural restrictions—and politics didn’t at all come into this—which it was no longer necessary, and why should it be? to fear reviving. After all, why not? Was there something strange about it?

Even old Maria, Maria Ludargnani, who that same winter, between 1946 and ’47 had reopened her brothel on Via Arianuova (the only place left, really, where you could gather without politics cropping up to poison relations between people; and so you could spend an evening there just as in the old days, mostly in gossiping or playing a game of rummy with the girls . . .), even Maria had absolutely refused one night to admit Geo when he came knocking at her door, nor could she be induced to leave the peephole, to which she remained glued for quite a while, till she finally saw him walk off into the fog. Well, if it hadn’t occurred to anyone on that awkward occasion that Geo was being robbed of his rights, it was all the more reasonable to admit that the Union Club had behaved towards him quite wisely and properly. Democracy, if this word had any meaning, must protect all the citizens: those at the bottom, agreed, but also those at the top!

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Only in 1948, after the elections of April 18, after the Provincial Chapter of the ANIP was forced to move out of his house, only in the summer of that year did Geo Josz decide to leave the city. He suddenly vanished, without leaving the slightest trace, like a character in a novel; and right away some said that he had emigrated to Palestine, others that he’d gone to South America, and there were even others who spoke of an unspecified country “behind the Iron Curtain.”

The talk about him lasted for a few months more—in the Exchange Café, at the Doro, in Maria Ludargnani’s brothel, and many other places. Daniele Josz often had occasion to air his opinions publicly on the subject. Attorney Jeremiah stepped in to take over as the legal guardian of the vanished man’s far from negligible financial interests. And meanwhile:

“What a madman,” you heard them repeat everywhere. Good-naturedly they would shake their heads, compressing their lips in silence and raising their eyes skywards.

“If only he’d had just a little patience!” they would add, sighing; and this time too they were sincere, this time too they were sincerely troubled.

Then they would go on to say that time, which heals everything in this world, and thanks to which Ferrara was, luckily, rising from its ruins just the same as before, time would at the end have calmed him too, would have helped him to find his place in the social hive—in short, to fit in again since this, when you got down to brass tacks, was his real problem. But instead, no. He had preferred to run away. To disappear. To play the tragic one. Just now when, if he’d rented his empty house on Via Campo-franco and put the proper effort into resuscitating his father’s business, he could have lived comfortably, like a gentleman, and could also have given some thought to setting up a family. To getting married, naturally; for there was not a young girl of his social class in Ferrara who would have regarded the difference in religion as an insurmountable obstacle (in this respect the years had not gone by in vain; everywhere people were much less strict than in the past!). Yes, he couldn’t have known, odd as he was, but that’s how things would have ended in ninety-nine chances out of a hundred—time would have fixed everything, just as though nothing, absolutely nothing, had ever happened. Of course, he would have had to wait. He would have had to learn how to control his nervousness. And instead: have you ever seen a crazier way of behaving? A more inexplicable character? Ah, but to understand what type of person, what sort of living enigma we had to deal with, the incident with Count Scocca—even without waiting for all the rest—would have, after all, been more than enough. . . .

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Yes, an enigma.

And yet on closer inspection—when, lacking any more certain evidence, we recall that feeling of absurdity mixed with a sense of the revelation of the truth which any chance encounter can evoke in us, especially as evening is approaching—that very incident with Count Scocca should not have seemed enigmatic or incomprehensible to a heart with even the slightest fellow feeling.

Oh, it’s quite true. The light of day is boredom, the deep slumber of the spirit, “tiresome hilarity,” as the poet says. But finally let the hour of twilight come, the hour of a calm May twilight evenly suffused with both shadow and light—and lo! people, things that before seemed perfectly normal and innocuous, may suddenly reveal themselves for what they really are; perhaps they may suddenly speak—and it will seem, at that moment, as though one were being struck by a thunderbolt—speak for the first time of themselves and of you.

“What am I doing here with this man? Who is he? And I, I who reply to his questions and thus lend myself to playing his game, who am I?”

It was two slaps which, after a moment or so of silent stupefaction, had answered like lightning Lionello Scocca’s persistent, though courteous questions. Yet those questions could also have been answered by a raging, inhuman scream, a scream so loud that the entire city, what was left of it from the intact delusive stage-set of Via Mazzini all the way to the shattered city walls, would have heard it with horror.

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¹ Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani—the Partisans' national organization.—Ed.