Giorgio Bassani

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.

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.