The Neapolitan Novels

8.

From that moment life began to pound me without respite, the months were rapidly grafted onto one another, there was no day when something good or bad didn’t happen. I returned to Naples, thinking about Nino, and that encounter without consequences, and at times the wish to see Lila was strong, to go and wait for her to come home from work, tell her what could be told without hurting her. Then I convinced myself that merely mentioning Nino would wound her, and I gave it up. Lila had gone her way, he his. I had urgent things to deal with. For example, the evening of my return from Milan I told my parents that Pietro was coming to meet them, that probably we would be married within the year, that I was going to live in Florence.

They showed no joy, or even satisfaction. I thought that they had finally grown used to my coming and going as I liked, increasingly estranged from the family, indifferent to their problems of survival. And it seemed to me normal that only my father became somewhat agitated, always nervous at the prospect of situations he didn’t feel prepared for.

“Does the university professor have to come to our house?” he asked, in irritation.

“Where else?” my mother said angrily. “How can he ask you for Lenuccia’s hand if he doesn’t come here?”

Usually she seemed more prepared than he, concrete, resolute to the point of indifference. But once she had silenced him, once her husband had gone to bed and Elisa and Peppe and Gianni had set up their beds in the dining room, I had to change my mind. She attacked me in very low but shrill tones, hissing with reddened eyes: We are nothing to you, you tell us nothing until the last minute, the young lady thinks she’s somebody because she has an education, because she writes books, because she’s marrying a professor, but my dear, you came out of this belly and you are made of this substance, so don’t act superior and don’t ever forget that if you are intelligent, I who carried you in here am just as intelligent, if not more, and if I had had the chance I would have done the same as you, understand? Then, on the crest of her rage, she first reproached me saying that because I had left, and thought only of myself, my siblings hadn’t done well in school, and then asked me for money, or, rather, demanded it: she needed it to buy a decent dress for Elisa and to fix up the house a bit, since I was forcing her to receive my fiancé.

I passed over my siblings’ lack of success in school. The money, on the other hand, I gave her right away, even if it wasn’t true that she needed it for the house—she continually asked for money, any excuse would do. Although she had never said so explicitly, she still couldn’t accept the fact that I kept my money in a post-office savings account, that I hadn’t handed it over to her as I always had, ever since I first took the stationer’s daughters to the beach, or worked in the bookstore on Via Mezzocannone. Maybe, I thought, by acting as if my money belonged to her she wants to convince me that I myself belong to her, and that, even if I get married, I will belong to her forever.

I remained calm, I told her as a sort of compensation that I would have a telephone put in, that I would buy a television on the installment plan. She looked at me uncertainly, with a sudden admiration that clashed with what she had just been saying.

“A television and telephone in this house here?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll pay for it?”

“Yes.”

“Always, even after you’re married?”

“Yes.”

“The professor knows that there’s not a cent for a dowry, and not even for a reception?”

“He knows, and we’re not having a reception.”

Again her mood changed, her eyes became inflamed.

“What do you mean, no reception? Make him pay.”

“No, we’re doing without.”

My mother became furious again, she provoked me in every way she could think of, she wanted me to respond so that she could get angrier.

“You remember Lila’s wedding, you remember the reception she had?”

“Yes.”

“And you, who are much better than she is, don’t want to do anything?”

“No.”

We went on like that until I decided that, rather than taking her rage in doses, it would be better to have it all at once, one grand fury:

“Ma,” I said, “not only are we not having a party but I’m not even getting married in church, I’m getting married at city hall.”

At that point it was as if doors and windows had been blown open by a strong wind. Although she wasn’t religious, my mother lost control and, leaning toward me, red in the face, began yelling insults at me. She shouted that the marriage was worthless if the priest didn’t say that it was valid. She shouted that if I didn’t get married before God I would never be a wife but only a whore, and, despite her lame leg, she almost flew as she went to wake my father, my siblings, to let them know what she had always feared, that too much education had ruined my brain, that I had had all the luck and yet I was treated like a whore, that she would never be able to go out of the house because of the shame of having a godless daughter.

My father, stunned, in his underwear, and my siblings sought to understand what other trouble they had to deal with because of me, and tried to calm her, but in vain. She shouted that she wanted to throw me out of the house immediately, before I exposed her, too, her, too, to the shame of having a concubine daughter like Lila and Ada. Meanwhile, although she wasn’t actually hitting me, she struck the air as if I were a shadow and she had grabbed a real me, whom she was beating ferociously. It was some time before she quieted down, which she did thanks to Elisa. My sister asked cautiously:

“But is it you who want to get married at city hall or is it your fiancé?”

I explained to her, but as if I were explaining the matter to all of them, that for me the Church hadn’t counted for a long time, but that whether I got married at city hall or at the altar was the same to me; while for my fiancé it was very important to have only a civil ceremony, he knew all about religious matters and believed that religion, however valuable, was ruined precisely when it interfered in the affairs of the state. In other words, I concluded, if we don’t get married at city hall, he won’t marry me.

At that point my father, who had immediately sided with my mother, suddenly stopped echoing her insults and laments.

“He won’t marry you?”

“No.”

“And what will he do, leave you?”

“We’ll go and live together in Florence without getting married.”

That information my mother considered the most intolerable of all. She completely lost control, vowing that in that case she would take a knife and cut my throat. My father instead nervously ruffled his hair, and said to her:

“Be quiet, don’t get me mad, let’s be reasonable. We know very well that someone can get married by the priest, have a fancy celebration, and still come to a bad end.”

He, too, was obviously alluding to Lila, the ever-vivid scandal of the neighborhood, and my mother finally understood. The priest wasn’t a guarantee, nothing was a guarantee in the brutal world we lived in. So she stopped shouting and left to my father the task of examining the situation and, if necessary, letting me have my way. But she didn’t stop pacing, with her limp, shaking her head, insulting my future husband. What was he, the professor? Was he a Communist? Communist and professor? Professor of that shit, she shouted. What kind of professor is he, one who thinks like that? A shit thinks like that. No, replied my father, what do you mean shit, he’s a man who’s educated and knows better than anyone what disgusting things the priests do, that’s why he wants to go and say “I do” only at city hall. Yes, you’re right, a lot of Communists do that. Yes, you’re right, like this our daughter doesn’t seem married. But I would trust this university professor: he loves her. I can’t believe that he would put Lenuccia in a situation where she seems like a whore. And anyway if we don’t want to trust him—but I do trust him, even if I don’t know him yet: he’s an important person, the girls here dream of a match like that—at least we can trust the city hall. I work there, at the city hall, and a marriage there, I can assure you, is as valid as the one in church and maybe even more.

He went on for hours. My siblings at a certain point collapsed and went back to sleep. I stayed to soothe my parents and persuade them to accept something that for me, at that moment, was an important sign of my entrance into Pietro’s world. Besides, it made me feel bolder than Lila. And most of all, if I met Nino again, I would have liked to be able to say to him, in an allusive way: See where that argument with the religion teacher led, every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives. But I would have been exaggerating, in reality it was much simpler. For at least ten years the God of childhood, already fairly weak, had been pushed aside like an old sick person, and I felt no need for the sanctity of marriage. The essential thing was to get out of Naples.