The Neapolitan Novels

109.

Around Christmas vacation in 1966 I got a very bad flu. I telephoned a neighbor of my parents—finally even in the old neighborhood many people had a telephone—and told them I wasn’t coming home for the vacation. Then I sank into desolate days of fever and coughing, while the college emptied, became silent. I ate nothing, I even had trouble drinking. One morning when I had fallen into an exhausted half-sleep, I heard loud voices, in my dialect, as when in the neighborhood the women leaned out the windows, arguing. From the darkest depths of my mind came the known footsteps of my mother. She didn’t knock, she opened the door, she entered, loaded down with bags.

It was unimaginable. She had hardly ever left the neighborhood, at most to go to the center of the city. Outside of Naples, as far as I knew, she had never been. And yet she had got on the train, had traveled all night, and had come to my room to heap on me Christmas food that she had prepared ahead of time, quarrelsome gossip in a loud voice, orders that were supposed, as if by magic, to bring me back to health and allow me to leave with her in the evening: because she had to go, at home she had other children and my father.

She depleted me more than the fever. She shouted so much, moving objects, carelessly rearranging things, that I was afraid the dean would come. At one point I felt I was fainting, I closed my eyes, hoping she wouldn’t follow me into the nauseating darkness I was being dragged into. But she didn’t stop at anything. Always in motion through the room, helpful and aggressive, she told me about my father, my siblings, the neighbors, friends, and, naturally, about Carmen, Ada, Gigliola, Lila.

I tried not to listen but she pursued me: Do you understand what she did, do you understand what happened? And she shook me, touching an arm or a foot buried under the covers. I discovered that, in the state of fragility caused by the illness, I was more sensitive to everything I couldn’t stand about her. I got angry—and I told her this—at how, with every word, she wanted to demonstrate that all my contemporaries, compared to me, had failed. “Stop it,” I muttered. She paid no attention, she kept repeating, You, on the other hand.

But what wounded me most was to sense behind her pride as a mother the fear that things would suddenly change and I would again lose points, no longer give her occasion to boast. She did not much trust the stability of the world. So she force-fed me, dried the sweat, made me take my temperature I don’t know how many times. Was she afraid I would die, depriving her of my trophy existence? Was she afraid that, being ill, I would give in, be in some way demoted, have to return home without glory? She spoke obsessively about Lila. She was so insistent that I suddenly perceived how highly she had regarded her since she was a child. Even she, I thought, even my mother, realized that Lila is better than me and now she is surprised that I’ve left her behind, she believes and doesn’t believe it, she’s afraid of losing her position as luckiest mother in the neighborhood. Look how combative she is, look at the arrogance in her eyes. I felt the energy she gave off, and I thought that her lameness had required her to have greater strength than normal, in order to survive, imposing on her the ferocity with which she moved inside and outside the family. What, on the other hand, was my father? A weak little man, trained to be obliging, to hold out his hand discreetly to pocket small tips: certainly he would never have managed to overcome all the obstacles and arrive at this austere building. She had done it.

When she left and the silence returned, on the one hand I felt relieved, on the other, because of the fever, I was moved. I thought of her alone, asking every passerby if this was the right direction for the train station, her, walking, with her lame leg, in an unknown city. She would never spend the money for a bus, she was careful not to waste even five lire. But she would make it: she would buy the right ticket and take the right trains, traveling overnight on the uncomfortable seats, or even standing, all the way to Naples. There, after another long walk, she would arrive in the neighborhood, and start polishing and cooking, she would cut up the eel, and prepare the insalata di rinforzo, and the chicken broth, and the struffoli, without resting for a moment, filled with rage, but consoling herself by saying, in some part of her brain, “Lenuccia is better than Gigliola, than Carmen, than Ada, than Lina, than all of them.”