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I would have liked to stroll through the Finzi-Contini garden. In fact, it was more of a park, as it covered ten hectares and contained lime trees, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, holm oaks, hollies, palm trees, eucalyptus... In the prologue to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Giorgio Bassani recounts that in the aftermath of World War II all those trees were cut down for firewood, so when the narrator and Micòl walk through it, we already know that this marvel is doomed to disappear. What happens in the cherry orchard of Chekhov's eponymous play is not very different, beautiful and evocative, but scarcely productive, destined to be replaced by summer houses. In the end, the spectators hear the sound of the axe beginning to fell the trees: another memory of what was and no longer is. When Micòl studies in Venice, the narrator evokes the afternoons he spent in the Finzi-Contini garden playing tennis or walking under the trees. He feels, he says, expelled from paradise. Indeed, paradise was our first garden, lost since the distant times of Genesis, and which we can only evoke with melancholy. It reconciled beauty and utility, since "Yahweh God made every tree grow from the ground that was pleasing to the eye and good for food." It was not necessary to work, in that garden —and orchard— of delights, and we had the opportunity to converse with God.
Even a man as little suspected of religious whims as Voltaire, at the end of Candide, proposes that we cultivate our garden. And yet, it is hard for us to imagine an intellectual like him digging with a hoe or pulling weeds. Likewise, it is hard for us to imagine Kafka working in the garden, and yet Reiner Stach, in his voluminous biography, informs us that, in the spring of 1913, when he fears and at the same time dreams of marriage to Felice Bauer, Kafka moves to the outskirts of Prague to work in the afternoons in an orchard located on the slope of Nusle. In that suburb of people with few resources, no one speaks German and no one knows him. We intuit that there, conversing with strangers with a shovel in hand, Kafka forgets his doubts and obsessions.
Also in the garden that the Beast cultivates, we glimpse the delicacy with which he will seduce Beauty. In the depths of the garden, a profound truth is hidden. Jerzy Kosinski, in the novel Being There—adapted to film with the title Welcome, Mr. Chance—, portrays the social ascent of an illiterate gardener who only knows how to utter sentences about flowers and seasons, which his interlocutors interpret as transcendent metaphors. "Not a single thought disturbed Chance's mind. Peace reigned in his heart." Between idiocy and sanctity, the protagonist becomes a serious candidate for the presidency of the United States.
Rudyard Kipling, author of memorable pages about the jungle, has a story titled The Gardener that narrates a woman's visit to the cemetery where her nephew, killed on the battlefield, rests. As she cannot find his grave, a providential gardener accompanies her. The story ends with this enigmatic sentence: "And she left, convinced that he was the gardener."
Let's return to Chekhov. Biographer Rosamund Bartlett explains that, in his house in Melikhovo, the writer planted sixty Vladimir cherry trees, which yield large, sweet, intensely red fruits. "All I do is walk around the garden eating cherries," he wrote in 1897. Two years later, he would sell the estate to a timber merchant who would soon cut them down. Perhaps when we stroll through our garden, hortus conclusus, wasting time while watching flowers open and fruits grow, is when we are most like God.
At the beginning of Chekhov's own narrative The Steppe, little Yegorushka passes by the cemetery in a cart: "Green and pleasant, surrounded by a stone fence over which, scattered among the greenery of the cherry trees, crosses and mausoleums peek out, which, seen from afar, are like white spots." Then, a symphony of colors unfolds: "Yegorushka remembers that, in spring, those white spots merged with the cherry blossoms and made a sea of alabaster; and when the fruit ripened, the mausoleums and crosses seemed sprinkled with purplish dots, like clotted blood." But, "on the other side of the fence, in the shade of the cherry trees, his father and grandmother Zinaída Danílovna slept night and day." Childhood and tombs, blossoming and cemetery... This is how Chekhov's cherry trees mix life and death, just as tragedy and comedy are mixed in The Cherry Orchard. The tragedy is remembering that we were cast out of paradise, the comedy is what we do to forget it.