The Neapolitan Novels

122.

As soon as I got home I had some bad news. My mother, convinced that it was her right to look at my mail when I was absent, had opened a package that came from Potenza. In the package she had found a number of my notebooks from elementary school and a note from Maestra Oliviero’s sister. The teacher, the note said, had died peacefully, twenty days earlier. She had often remembered me, in recent times, and had asked that some notebooks from elementary school that she had saved be returned to me. I was distressed, even more than my sister Elisa, who wept inconsolably for hours. This bothered my mother, who first yelled at her younger daughter and then, so that I, her older daughter, could hear it clearly, commented aloud: “That imbecile always thought she was more of a mother than I am.”

All day I thought of Maestra Oliviero and of how she would have been proud to know about my degree, about the book I was going to publish. When everyone went to bed I shut myself in the silent kitchen and leafed through the notebooks one after the other. How well she had taught me, the teacher, what beautiful handwriting she had instilled. Too bad that my adult writing had gotten smaller, that speed had simplified the letters. I smiled at the spelling mistakes, marked with furious strokes, at the goods, the excellents, which she wrote punctiliously in the margin when she found a good expression or the right solution to a difficult problem, at the high marks she always gave me. Had she really been more mother than my mother? For a time I hadn’t been sure. But she had imagined for me a road that my mother wasn’t able to imagine and had compelled me to take it. For this I was grateful to her.

I was putting aside the package to go to bed when I noticed in the middle of one of the notebooks a small, thin sheaf of paper, ten pages of graph paper fastened with a pin and refolded. I felt a sudden emptiness in my chest: I recognized The Blue Fairy, the story that Lila had written so many years before, how many? Thirteen, fourteen. How I had loved the cover colored with pastels, the beautifully drawn letters of the title: at the time I had considered it a real book and had been envious of it. I opened it to the center page. The pin had rusted, leaving brown marks on the paper. I saw, with amazement, that the teacher had written beside a sentence: beautiful. So she had read it? So she had liked it? I turned the pages one after the other, they were full of her wonderfuls, goods, very goods. I got angry. Old witch, I thought, why didn’t you tell us that you liked it, why did you deny Lila that satisfaction? What drove you to fight for my education and not for hers? Is the refusal of the shoemaker to let his daughter take the admission examination enough to justify you? What unhappiness did you have in your head that you unloaded onto her? I began to read The Blue Fairy from the beginning, racing over the pale ink, the handwriting so similar to mine of that time. But already at the first page I began to feel sick to my stomach and soon I was covered with sweat. Only at the end, however, did I admit what I had understood after a few lines. Lila’s childish pages were the secret heart of my book. Anyone who wanted to know what gave it warmth and what the origin was of the strong but invisible thread that joined the sentences would have had to go back to that child’s packet, ten notebook pages, the rusty pin, the brightly colored cover, the title, and not even a signature.