Rinaldo

Rinaldo is the scholar who gives Didier, at sixteen, his first experience of intellectual and physical tenderness, and whose later rejection becomes the defining shame of Didier’s life. He appears only in Didier’s recollection, related to Lin, but the account makes him more than a benevolent teacher: Rinaldo’s generosity opens a world to the boy, while their separation exposes the difference between love and the tests people try to impose on it.

Identity and Introduction

Rinaldo was forty-eight when he met Didier, who had arrived in Genova by chance after leaving his father’s house, city, and country at sixteen. Before their meeting, Didier describes a childhood shaped by failure at school, his father’s brutal temper, truancy, and time in juvenile prisons. Rinaldo enters this account at the point when Didier’s life might otherwise seem to be narrowing into a succession of punishments and departures. Their encounter on a Genova beach begins a different education.

Rinaldo came from a family with an ancient noble title, a lineage Didier says reached back to the time of Columbus. Yet he lived in a magnificent house on the cliffs without the pretensions of his rank. Didier recalls him as a scholar of exceptional breadth, someone whose learning joined the history of art to antiquity, poetry to music, and music to poetry. This range is central to the way Didier remembers him: Rinaldo did not merely give lessons in separate subjects but made them feel like parts of a larger, beautiful world.

The Teacher Who Changed Didier’s Life

Rinaldo taught Didier what he calls the secrets of antiquity, the history of art, and the reciprocal poetry of music and verse. On the boulevard of sand in Genova, he taught him to read Rimbaud and Verlaine. The remembered lessons attach learning to particular places and forms of attention: knowledge comes not as an abstract credential but through a teacher who shares what he loves with a boy who had felt incapable of understanding the languages of school.

Didier contrasts Rinaldo’s physical presence with that of his father. He remembers his father’s hand as cold and brutally large, the instrument of blows that left his childhood body shocked and bruised. Rinaldo’s hands, by contrast, were long, slender, warm, and expressive. Didier says that Rinaldo made tenderness in everything he touched. The contrast gives the mentorship its bodily as well as intellectual force: the relationship replaces punishment with care, and Didier describes himself as learning to love with both mind and body. He says he was born in Rinaldo’s arms, presenting their intimacy as a beginning in his life rather than simply an episode in it.

Love, Theft, and Separation

Rinaldo and Didier loved one another, but Rinaldo made the mistake, in Didier’s later judgment, of testing that love. He allowed Didier to discover the hidden place where he kept a large sum of cash. Didier took the money and ran away. His recollection refuses to soften either fact: he says that he loved Rinaldo, stole from him, and left. The breach is therefore not presented as proof that affection was false. Instead, Didier argues that Rinaldo’s test confused love with qualities that can be tested, such as honesty and loyalty. For Didier, love begins in a part of a person that does not die, and it can persist even when the loved person becomes an object of hatred.

This account does not erase the harm of the theft or claim that love made Didier loyal. Its force comes from holding those contradictions together. Rinaldo’s trust exposed Didier to temptation; Didier chose to betray that trust; and the love he says remained did not undo the consequences of his choice. Their separation becomes the history behind a later decision in which Didier has the chance to respond to Rinaldo’s need and again chooses flight.

The Reunion and Didier’s Shame

Almost fifteen years later, another turn of fortune brought Didier back to Genova. He saw Rinaldo on the same sandy boulevard where Rinaldo had taught him to read. Rinaldo was sitting among men of his own age, watching two elderly men play chess. Didier notes his grey cardigan and black velvet scarf, then the changes in his appearance: his hair was almost gone, his face hollow, and his skin discolored as if he were recovering from a serious illness or succumbing to one. Didier does not know what the illness was or what became of it.

Rinaldo did not recognize him. Didier deliberately averted his gaze and adopted a stooping walk to disguise himself. As he glanced back, he saw Rinaldo coughing violently into a white handkerchief and thought he saw blood on it. Rather than approach, Didier walked faster, then ran. The moment reverses the earlier scene of a young Didier being received into Rinaldo’s care: now the older, healthier man has the means to help, while the man who once taught him tenderness sits within reach.

When Didier explains the memory to Lin, he distinguishes this failure from the other shameful or criminal things he has done. He says he had enough money, time, and good health to help Rinaldo, and insists that he did not hurry away because of guilt over the stolen money, fear of illness, or reluctance to accept a burden. He attributes his flight to Rinaldo’s old age and loss of beauty. Didier identifies this abandonment—not the theft—as the one act in his life of which he is truly ashamed. Rinaldo’s significance in the story thus rests partly on his absence from the present: through Didier’s account, a remembered teacher becomes the measure by which Didier exposes the cruelty hidden in his own avoidance.