The Neapolitan Novels

80.

It wasn’t because of the exams that I stopped seeing Antonio. The two things happened to coincide, because just then he came to see me, rather relieved, to tell me that he had accepted a job from the Solara brothers. I didn’t like it, it seemed to me another sign of his illness. He hated the Solaras. He had scuffled with them as a boy to defend his sister. He, Pasquale, and Enzo had beaten up Marcello and Michele and destroyed their car. But the main thing was that he had left me because I went to ask Marcello for his help in getting Antonio out of military service. Why, then, had he succumbed like that? He gave me confused explanations. He said that in the Army he had learned that if you are a simple soldier you owe obedience to anyone who wears stripes. He said that order is better than disorder. He said he had learned how you come up behind a man and kill him before he has even heard you arrive. I understood that the illness had something to do with it but that the real problem was poverty. He had presented himself at the bar to ask for work. And Marcello had treated him a little roughly but then had offered him a fixed amount each month—he put it like that—without, however, a precise duty, only to be available.

“Available?”

“Yes.”

“Available for what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Forget it, Antò.”

He didn’t. And because of that job he ended up quarreling with both Pasquale and Enzo, who had returned from military service more taciturn than before, more inflexible. Illness or not, neither of them could forgive Antonio for that decision. Pasquale, although he was engaged to Ada, went so far as to threaten him, he said that, brother-in-law or not, he didn’t want to see him anymore.

I quickly got away from these problems and concentrated on my graduation exam. While I studied day and night, sometimes, overwhelmed by the heat, I thought again about the previous summer, before Pinuccia left, when Lila, Nino, and I were a happy trio, or at least so it seemed to me. But I repressed every image, and even the faintest echo of a word: I allowed no distractions.

The exam was a crucial moment of my life. In a couple of hours I wrote an essay on the role of Nature in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi, putting in, along with lines I knew by heart, finely written reworkings from the textbook of Italian literary history; but, most important, I handed in my Latin and Greek tests when my schoolmates, including Alfonso, had barely started on it. This attracted the attention of the examiners, in particular of an old, extremely thin teacher, with a pink suit and freshly coiffed, pale-blue hair, who kept smiling at me. But the real turning point took place during the oral exams. I was praised by all the professors, but in particular I gained the approval of the examiner with the blue hair. She had been struck by my essay not only because of what I said but because of how I said it.

“You write very well,” she said, with an accent I didn’t recognize, but anyway far from Neapolitan.

“Thank you.”

“Do you really think that nothing is fated to last, not even poetry?”

“That’s what Leopardi thinks.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think that beauty is a sham.”

“Like the Leopardian garden?”

I didn’t know anything about Leopardian gardens, but I answered, “Yes. Like the sea on a calm day. Or like a sunset. Or like the sky at night. It’s like face powder patted on over the horror. If you take it away, we are left alone with our fear.”

The sentences came easily, I uttered them with an inspired cadence. And, besides, I wasn’t improvising, it was an adaptation of what I had written in the essay.

“What faculty do you intend to choose?”

I didn’t know much about faculties, that meaning of the term was barely familiar to me. I was evasive:

“I’ll sit the civil-service exam.”

“You won’t go to the university?”

My cheeks burned, as if I were unable to hide a sin.

“No.”

“You need to work?”

“Yes.”

I was dismissed, I returned to Alfonso and the others. But a little later the professor came up to me in the hallway, and talked for a long time about a kind of college in Pisa, where, if you passed an exam like the one I had already done, you studied free.

“If you come back here in a couple of days, I’ll give you all the necessary information.”

I listened, but the way you do when someone is talking to you about something that will never really concern you. And when, two days later, I went back to school, only out of fear that the professor would be offended and give me a low grade, I was struck by the very precise information that she had transcribed for me on a sheet of foolscap. I never met her again, I don’t even know her name, and yet I owe her a great deal. Continuing to address me formally, she unaffectedly gave me a dignified farewell embrace.

The exams were over, I passed with an A average. Alfonso also did well, with a B average. Before leaving forever, with no regrets, the run-down gray building whose only merit, in my eyes, was that Nino, too, had been there, I caught sight of Professor Galiani and went to say goodbye. She congratulated me on my results but without enthusiasm. She didn’t offer me books for the summer, she didn’t ask what I would do now that I had my high-school diploma. Her distant tone upset me, I thought that things between us had been settled. What was the trouble? Once Nino had left her daughter and had fallen out of touch, was I to be associated with him forever, the same clay: insubstantial, unserious, unreliable? I was used to being liked by everyone, to wrapping that liking around me like shining armor; I was disappointed, and I think that her indifference had an important role in the decision I then made. Without talking about it to anyone (who could I ask advice from, anyway, if not Professor Galiani?) I applied for admission to the Pisa Normale. I immediately started doing everything I possibly could to earn money. Since the upper-class families whose children I had given lessons to all year were happy with me and my reputation as a good teacher had spread, I was able to fill the August days with new students who had to retake, in September, their exams in Latin, Greek, history, philosophy, and even mathematics. At the end of the month I found myself rich, I had amassed seventy thousand lire. I gave fifty to my mother, who reacted with a violent gesture, she almost tore the money from my hand and stuffed it in her bra, as if we were not in the kitchen of our house but on the street and she was afraid of being robbed. I didn’t tell her that I had kept twenty thousand lire for myself.

Not until the day before my departure did I tell my family that I was going to Pisa to take exams. “If they accept me,” I announced, “I’ll go there to study and I won’t have to spend a lira for anything.” I spoke with great decisiveness, in Italian, as if it were not a subject that could be reduced to dialect, as if my father, my mother, my siblings shouldn’t and couldn’t understand what I was about to do. In fact they confined themselves to listening uneasily, it seemed to me that in their eyes I was no longer me but a stranger who had come to visit at an inconvenient time. Finally my father said, “Do what you have to do but be careful, we can’t help you.” And he went to bed. My little sister asked if she could come with me. My mother, instead, said nothing, but before she vanished she left five thousand lire on the table for me. I stared at it for a long time, without touching it. Then, overcoming my scruples about how I wasted money to satisfy my whims, I thought, it’s my money, and I took it.

For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn’t be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.

Everything went well. Except the exam, it seemed. The professor with the blue hair hadn’t told me that it would be much more difficult than the graduation exam. The Latin, especially, seemed complex, but really that was only the beginning: every test was the occasion for an extremely painstaking investigation of my skills. I held forth, I stammered, I often pretended to have the answer on the tip of my tongue. The professor of Italian treated me as if even the sound of my voice irritated him: You, miss, do not make a logical argument when you write but flit from one thing to another; I see, miss, that you launch recklessly into subjects in which you are completely ignorant of the issues of critical method. I was depressed, I quickly lost confidence in what I was saying. The professor realized it and, looking at me ironically, asked me to talk about something I had read recently. I suppose he meant something by an Italian writer, but I didn’t understand and clung to the first support that seemed to me secure, that is to say the conversation we had had the summer before, on Ischia, on the beach of Citara, about Beckett and about Dan Rooney, who, although he was blind, wanted to become deaf and mute as well. The professor’s ironic expression changed slowly to bewilderment. He cut me off me quickly and delivered me to the history professor. He was just as bad. He subjected me to an endless and exhausting list of questions formulated with the utmost precision. I had never felt so ignorant as I did at that moment, not even in the worst years of school, when I had done so badly. I was able to answer everything, dates, events, but only in an approximate way. As soon as he pressed me with even more exacting questions I gave up. Finally he asked me, disgusted, “Have you ever read something that is not simply the school textbook?”

I said, “I’ve studied the idea of nationhood.”

“Do you remember the name of the author of the book?”

“Federico Chabod.”

“Let’s hear what you understood.”

He listened to me attentively for several minutes, then abruptly dismissed me, leaving me with the certainty that I had said a lot of nonsense.

I cried and cried, as if I had carelessly lost somewhere the most promising part of myself. Then I said that despair was stupid, I had always known that I wasn’t really smart. Lila, yes, she was smart, Nino, yes, he was smart. I was only presumptuous and had been justly punished.

Instead I found out that I had passed the exam. I would have a place of my own, a bed that I didn’t have to make at night and unmake in the morning, a desk and all the books I needed. I, Elena Greco, the daughter of the porter, at nineteen years old was about to pull myself out of the neighborhood, I was about to leave Naples. By myself.